Mariama Bâ

Mariama Bâ was born on the seventeenth of April 1929 at Dakar, in then-French West Africa, the daughter of a clerk in the colonial civil service and the granddaughter of a senior translator at the French colonial governor’s palace at Dakar. Her mother died when Bâ was a small child, and she was raised by her grandparents in the Lebou Muslim household of her grandfather at the Plateau quarter of Dakar.

She was placed at the École normale d’institutrices de Rufisque — the principal French colonial teacher-training school for girls of West Africa — and completed the primary teaching certificate in 1947, finishing first in her class of all West African candidates.

She was a primary-school teacher at Dakar for twelve years from 1947 to 1959 and an Inspector of Education in the post-independence Senegalese Ministry of Education from 1959 to 1979 — the period across which she raised the nine children of her two marriages.

She was active across the same period in the post-independence Senegalese feminist circle of the Soroptimist Club of Dakar, the Federation of Senegalese Women’s Associations, and the African Women’s Education and Status Improvement Society. She gave the principal address of the 1976 General Assembly of the Soroptimist Club at Dakar on the conjugal rights of African women under polygamy.

She wrote across the late 1970s the epistolary novel Une si longue lettre — the long letter from Ramatoulaye Fall, a recently widowed Senegalese schoolteacher of Dakar, to her childhood friend Aïssatou — across the four months of the mourning period prescribed by Senegalese Muslim custom. The novel was published in 1980 at the Dakar house Les Nouvelles Éditions africaines and was awarded the inaugural Noma Award for Publishing in Africa at the 1980 Frankfurt Book Fair — the first such award and the first awarded to a Black African woman novelist.

She completed in 1980 the manuscript of the second novel Un chant écarlate — published posthumously in 1981 — the chronicle of the marriage of a Senegalese man and a French woman across the closing years of the colonial period and the opening years of independence.

She died at Dakar on the seventeenth of August 1981 of complications of a long illness, at fifty-two, three months before the publication of Un chant écarlate.

She is honored here as the author of Une si longue lettre.