Book 1 of 54: "So Long A Letter" by Mariama Bâ

About the author: Mariama Bâ

This is a deeply felt novel that mirrors some of the events of the author's own life. Born on 17 April 1929, Bâ was raised a Muslin in Dakar, Senegal. She was raised by her grandparents, who did not believe that girl children should be educated. As a result, she really had to struggle to get an education. She eventually qualified as a teacher, taught for twelve years, and became a school inspector as a result of issues with her health. Bâ was married to a member of Senegal's national assembly; they divorced and she was left to care for their nine children alone.

Bâ started writing quite critically about the shortcomings of African traditional society. She burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, "So Long A Letter", in 1980. Unfortunately, she died a year later, before the publication of her second novel. One can only imagine what great works she could have given us had she lived longer.

So Long A Letter (Senegal)



"So Long A Letter" tells the story of Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese schoolteacher and the events before and after the death of her husband. It is written as a letter to her childhood friend Aissatou, who immigrated to America after her husband allowed himself to be blackmailed by his mother into taking a second wife. Aissatou completely rejects what her culture says she ought to do in this situation and decides to leave her husband.

Ramatoulaye goes through something similar. Before his death, her husband marries a second wife in an unexpected twist. He does not have the courage to talk to her about it, instead he keeps this courtship a secret and only after he has married the second wife does he send his brother and their Iman to tell Ramatoulaye what he has done.

He leaves Ramatoulaye to raise their twelve children by herself and spends all his money and time on his second wife. Slowly Ramatoulaye starts to realise that the patriachal society she lives in is not going to help her with this predicament. She slowly starts to realise that, Like Aissatou, she too cannot look to her culture and that she needs to reject it.
 
Bâ shows us how much responsibility African women take on and how African society would collapse without them. And yet, we do not value them as much as we should. She uses African men's lack of accountability and sexual instinct to demonstrate our irresponsibility and our pathology for hurting African women.

I am a male, and as such, my views of the lived experience of females is very very very limited (to say the least). I can only draw on the second hand experience of all the women that have been mothers, sisters and friends to me.

Bâ's novel was published in Senegal (on the other side of the continent from me) in 1980 (when I wasn't even an idea to my parents), and yet her views on the treatment of women in society in general still ring true today.

I see it in the way we emphasize to young girls to be neat and clean little ladies and how we don't do the same for young boys. Whether it is my school's deputy principal telling the girls at our school off at an assembly about their short skirts and untidy hair or my own mother telling my female cousins how they should dress and behave if they want to be married one day.

I see it in the way we police the bad behaviour of women and we don't do it to men: my uncle's wife was told she should accept that her husband had a girlfriend on the side because he married her and so he would always come back to her; my grandmother told me about her own father's philandering and simply told me "that's the way men are"; and yet when a woman I know had one sexual encounter with another man after her husband spent years cheating on her, she was demonized for being unable to keep her legs crossed.

I see it in the phrasing of the language we use. Whether it is a male colleague of mine insulting the boys in his class by saying "there are only girls in this class" (and the female students laughing the loudest) and seeing nothing wrong with that! Or the songs we sing at weddings that tell women what they should and should not do in marriage (and yet there are no such songs directed at men) and being told that I know nothing about life when I point this out.

It still astonishes me how much our society is built around protecting male privilege (across race, culture and even sexuality). Both men and women do whatever is necessary to protect the status quo. Bâ teaches us that women are just as important (if not more so) as men and for us to build successful societies, we need to take this lesson more seriously than we have in the past.