Biography
Mariama Bâ was a Senegalese author and feminist, whose two French-language novels were both translated into more than a dozen languages. Her first novel, which was published when she was fifty, “Une Si Longue Lettre” (“So Long a Letter”), found resounding success internationally for its exploration of modern femininity under Islam.
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Mariama Bâ was a Senegalese author and feminist, whose two French-language novels were both translated into more than a dozen languages. Her first novel, which was published when she was fifty, “Une Si Longue Lettre” (“So Long a Letter”), found resounding success internationally for its exploration of modern femininity under Islam. It won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, has been translated into many languages, and to this day is read widely in West African schools. Mariama became one of the first black African women to achieve international renown as an author.
An essay she wrote about women’s inequality was published in a Senegalese magazine in 1952, and she began to realize the power of expression in writing. She would go on to write novels that centered on an internal crisis she felt, torn between the traditional environment in which she grew up — her childhood home and family — and the progressive society that she yearned to see for women. Sadly, her literary fame was cut short when she died of lung cancer in 1981.
Today, she is still regarded as a Senegalese pioneer who was fiercely outspoken about women’s rights. “We must give, in African literature, to Black women a dimension commensurate with their commitment, alongside men, in the battles for liberation,” she said in a speech before Senegal’s National Assembly in 1979. Bâ wanted to embrace and advance an African worldview that embraced respect and equality between the sexes. Bâ wanted to embrace and advance an African worldview that embraced respect and equality between the sexes.
Bâ’s influence extended beyond her writing. She founded Cercle Fémina, a feminist organization, and was a member of Dakar’s Soroptimist Club, a volunteer group that focuses on education and training for women and girls. “My heart rejoices each time a woman emerges from the shadows,” she wrote. “I know that the field of our gains is unstable, the retention of conquests difficult: Social constraints are ever-present, and male egoism resists.”
- Lifespan
- 1929-1981
- Nationality
- Senegalese
- Occupations
- Novelist, Teacher, Feminist
- Era
- Postcolonial Literature
- Born
- 1929 Reviewed
- Died
- 1981 Reviewed
- Tags
- Senegalese, Postcolonial Literature, Novelist, Teacher, Feminist
- Themes
- Activism, Writing, Education, Global History