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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
To speak of women in Africa is to take a number of symbolic relationships governing individuals’ lives into consideration. It is a fact that societies today are characterized by the massive presence of the phenomenon of urbanization. The women I am concerned with here are those who inhabit an urban environment or exist in relationship to one, since the city, real or imaginary, forms an integral part of the space in which women, whatever their origins, live and move.
Author's note: The educational system operating in the Ivory Coast has not made it possible for me and many others to be able to write in one or more of the languages of the country. I trust the reader will excuse the fact - for which I take full responsibility - that the summary in the local language is missing.
1. The Swiss-French woman novelist Amélie Plume, who describes women's daily life so well in all her books, writes: "You realize, Raoul, that women who represent more than 50 percent of the world population do 66 percent of the work, earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property on the planet! Raoul, did you hear? Do you find that's still too much?," Hélas nos chéris sont nos ennemis (Geneva: Zoé, 1995), p. 13. (Editorial note: See too the Rapport mondial sur le développement humain, PNUD 1995, Paris: Economica, 1995).
2. The fact is that the woman herself in Africa, whatever her educational level, believes in the rightness of this division. It is as if the way people think had been tailored to this effect.
3. See "Seconde journée: la première parole et la jupe de fibres" (Paris: Fayard, 1966), p. 23f.
4. Plato, Symposium, 189df.
5. This concept is explored in the film by the Malian director Adama Drabo, Tafé Fanga ("The Power of the Pagne"), 1996, a film screened in the competition at the FESPACO, Ouagadougou, February 1997, which shows how menstruating women withdraw and live in a hut set aside for them at the edge of the village.
6. Aminata Sow Fall, Le Jujubier du pariarche (Dakar: Khoudia, 1993), p. 39: "In their village, when a couple had no child, it was because the woman was abnormal, because she bore a curse within herself."
7. In the daily life of African women the child is a treasure, as is shown by the names given at birth. Here the name can act in a negative or positive way on the life of the person named. This harks back to the Platonic problem of the rightness of names. A name always carries with it - or so it is believed - a whole metaphysical and cosmic charge which puts him who bears it in con tact with what he must most closely resemble. Moreover the purpose of other names is simply to keep alive the child born into a family that has already lost many others, for example "The Traveler" or "The Leaver" (meaning "could he tarry with us awhile?") or the "Trash Heap" ("perhaps he is bringing us hap piness; at least he is there even if no one wants him"). A study of the names could be interesting, but is not my present concern; it should be noted that most African writers play on the meaning of the names they give their fic tional characters.
8. Aminata Sow Fall, p. 38.
9. Ibid.
10. The Congolese novelist Sony Labou Tansi (1947-1995) has familiarized us with terms that give clear expression to this attitude. The woman is "meat." But some perhaps escape the common lot; they become women of bronze, Estina Bronzarios; see Les Sept Solitudes de Lorsa Lopez (Paris: Seuil, 1985).
11. Anne Laure Folly, a Togolese director, shows, by letting women express them selves freely in her film Femmes aux yeux ouverts (documentary, 1993) that African women have for centuries "kept their eyes lowered." Today they at last dare raise their eyes to see the world for themselves. The title of the film by Fanta Régina Nacro, from Burkina Faso, speaks volumes too in this regard: Puk nini ("Open Yours Eyes"), short, 1995. This film recounts the meeting around the same man of a model wife and a courtesan experienced in the secrets of seduction.
12. As Roland Barthes shows in Système de la mode (Paris: Seuil, 1967).
13. Here it would be tempting to write a whole chapter on the pagne, that highly prized object which is in itself a whole set of signs, an entire discourse. In cer tain regions, such as that of the Baoulés in Côte d'Ivoire, proverbs were woven on the pagnes. Today in the cities each pagne has a name. They are strictly speaking texts which record a country's history, the fantasies and the daily life of a given society.
14. In southwest Côte d'Ivoire, Mamy Watta appears among the characters of the mural paintings. This myth of the seductive woman continues to inspire artists. Véronique Tadjo, the Ivorian woman novelist and poet, has written a version of it for children: Mamy Watta and the monster (Abidjan: Les Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes, 1993); the film-maker Burkinabé Gaston Kaboré, in Buud Yam (Stallion of the Yennenga), FESPACO, Ouagadougou, 1997, recounts, in one episode of the film, the meeting of the hero at one point during his initia tory journey with a water-nymph.
15. And there is surely no need to remind the reader that the pursuit of this noth ing is not exclusive to Africa; the terms may change but the problem remains essentially the same. As Amélie Plume says with her novelist's gusto: "Some men, nice men at that, have claimed that we have nothing between our legs and that they have something. That's odd seeing how taken they are with this nothing […]. But beware, it is not just a matter of pure wonderment. Our nothing that they are so taken with, alas, they also fear it, despise it, hate it …," Hélas nos chéris sont nos ennemis, p. 85.
16. See Claudine Vidal, "Guerre des sexes à Abidjan. Masculin, Féminin, CFA," Cahiers d'études africaines, XVII, 1 (no. 65), 1978, p. 125. She is fed and housed less and less well if the number of children increases without the father's income going up. A period of unemployment, the illness of a child, or the older ones starting school, and the situation becomes critical; solidarity within the extended family can no longer see her though the worst. The woman has to make a financial contribution by working outside the home: "she shares the misfortune."
17. Much could be said about the "Mamies Benz," the name given in certain countries of the Gulf of Guinea to prosperous shopkeepers. They have a real economic power which can influence the politics of a country. Physically a Mamie Benz is a stout woman who dresses accordingly, wearing preferably a "two-pagnes" which envelops the whole of the lower half of her body down to her ankles.
18. See the novel Notre pain de chaque nuit (Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 1998).
19. See the novel by Sony Labou Tansi, La Vie et demie (Paris: Seuil, 1979).
20. Certain everyday expressions, such as Sotigui in Dioula, a word some wives use to designate their husbands, reflect this vision of things: "master of the house."
21. So one can understand the fight against excision engaged in by women, NGOs (like ENDA-Tiers Monde in Senegal, AIDF in Côte d'Ivoire), and by certain governments (like that of Burkina Faso) against excision. Controversy has raged around this problem ever since 1978, the year in which there appeared the book by the Senegalese woman writer Awa Thiam, La Parole aux négresses, with a preface by Benoîte Groult (Paris: Denoël Gonthier).
22. Even if, in this domain, nothing can be more relative than considerations of a moral nature.
23. Tilaï ("Questions of Honor"), 1990, a feature film by Idrissa Ouédraogo (Burk ina Faso), shows that in Africa (as elsewhere) no man touches with impunity the woman or girl betrothed to another; it is a question of honor, to be avenged in blood.
24. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987).
25. E. Dongala, p. 11.
26. In the Ivory Coast Bernard Dadié and Ahmadou Kourouma, in the Congo Sony Labou Tansi and Emmanuel Dongala (not to mention more) have cre ated worlds dominated by the massive presence of the "Fathers."
27. As can readily be demonstrated, power is frequently seized by violence in a bloodbath. Repeated coups d'état are an integral part of history. The succes sors can also be military men.
28. In certain countries like the Ivory Coast the Catholic church has however played a leading role in the education of girls.
29. Does the man accept that the woman can have the same educational level as himself? To make access to knowledge freely available is to open the door, it is believed, to female domination. This domination is not that of the mother as protective spirit but of the woman considered as a body and as an object of exchange, of play, and of consumption.
30. Each of the sisters of President Houphouët-Boigny, first president of Côte d'Ivoire, is called "Mamie," followed by the usual first name.
31. The mother or national mum as Sony Labou Tansi puts it in L'État honteux (Paris: Seuil, 1981): "We led him from National Mum's village to the capital where he had never been before, never in his life," p. 7; "We all cheered when he called his mother Cook of the Nation. ‘National Hotelière, Mr President,' said Carvanso. ‘Oh, why?' ‘It's more beautiful, Mr President,' p. 12.
32. But the question remains: how can fairer and more human relationships be re-established in the African city?
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