Ba spoke out on women ’s legal rights, on education, on polygamy, and, anticipating by many years an issue that became hotly debated at the century ’s end, on female genital mutilation.īa ’s first novel, Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), was published in 1980, when Ba was 51 years old. “We do not have time to waste if we are going to bring something better to African women, ” she was quoted as saying in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Joining several international women ’s organizations that were establishing fledgling chapters in Africa, she became a noted essayist and lecturer. Prior to becoming a fiction writer, though, Ba became more and more involved in women ’s issues in general. Many of Ba ’s experiences found their way into her two novels, which appeared in the last years of her life. Later divorced from Diop, she worked as a secretary and as a school inspector. She married the Senegalese politician Obeye Diop and had nine children by him the rigors of raising such a large family took their toll on her health, and she was forced to give up her teaching post. When she was 14 she placed first in a West Africa wide competition for admission to a select French secondary school, and she became a published essayist before she graduated. In her writing career she would combined a talent for expression in the European forms of the novel and the essay with a moral strength and certainty rooted in her traditional belief system. So Ba enjoyed, in a sense, the best of two worlds. Her father, who in 1956 became the first health minister of newly independent Senegal, continued to take an interest in her welfare and to stress the benefits of a European-style education. But Ba was mostly raised by her strict, traditional maternal grandparents, her mother having died when she was young.
Her father was a government official, and she enjoyed the best education available to an African woman of the day, attending and excelling in French-language schools. When Mariama Ba was born in its capital city of Dakar in 1929, Senegal had been under French domination for several centuries it was one of the areas from which African slaves were shipped to the Western Hemisphere. Senegal is a small country on Africa ’s Atlantic coast. In a wider sense, Ba captured the conflicts that arose in many African societies as Africans struggled to reconcile their traditional cultures with influences brought by their European former colonizers. A crusader for the rights of women in the strongly patriarchal world of Islamic West Africa, she wrote two widely acclaimed novels that explored the psychological damage done to African women traditional misogynistic practices, such as polygamy. The Senegalese novelist Mariama Ba was considered one of the most important African writers of the twentieth century.
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