Mariama Ba
1 book analyzed
Biography
Mariama Ba (1929-1981) was born in Dakar, Senegal, raised by her maternal grandparents after her mother's early death. Educated at the Ecole Normale for girls in Rufisque -- the same institution Ramatoulaye and Aissatou attend in the novel -- she became a schoolteacher and an inspector of education. She married a Senegalese politician, Obaye Diop, had nine children, and divorced him -- an act of courage in a society that stigmatized divorced women. She was an active member of Senegalese women's organizations and wrote So Long a Letter partly from personal experience with polygamy and its aftermath. The novel was published in 1979, won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1980, and Ba died of cancer in 1981, just before her second novel Scarlet Song was published. She did not live to see her work become the foundational text of African feminist literature.