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This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
There weren’t many opportunities for girls growing up in Senegal under French colonial rule. They could become subservient housewives, farmers or, if they were lucky enough to get an education, teachers or secretaries. Schooling was generally reserved for boys.
But from an early age, Mariama Bâ showed promise. Her father insisted she go to school, and a headmistress noticed her aptitude. “You have a gift,” she told her.
Bâ went on to break free of the shackles of her patriarchal society. She also carved a path for future generations of women as an advocate, a teacher and, perhaps most notably, a literary trailblazer after Senegal achieved independence from France in 1960.
Her first novel, “Une Si Longue Lettre” (“So Long a Letter”), published in 1979, found resounding success internationally for its exploration of modern femininity under Islam. It won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, has been translated into many languages, and to this day is read widely in West African schools.
In essence, it represented the voice of a generation that was discovering itself in a newly independent nation.
Mariama Bâ was born on April 17, 1929, in coastal Dakar, Senegal’s largest city and later its capital. She was brought up by her grandmother Yaye Coumba in a Lebu Muslim household. Her mother, Fatou Kiné Gaye, died when Mariama was 4. Her father, Amadou Bâ, founded the separatist African Autonomist Movement in 1946 and later became the minister of health and population. He remained active in Mariama’s upbringing, having her study in both French and Quranic schools.
Still, she was expected to learn how to cook, clean and, “when the time came, fall without my consent into another family, that of my husband,” Bâ said in a 1979 interview with Amina, a women’s magazine.
She later attended Dakar Girls’ School and planned to become a secretary. But at 14 she passed the certification exam with such impressive scores that the school’s headmistress, Berthe Maubert, pulled her aside from the class of future secretaries and told her: “Everyone else but you. You are intelligent.”
Maubert pushed Bâ to continue her education at the prestigious École Normale, a teacher-training school for girls in the Senegalese city of Rufisque. After graduating in 1947, she taught reading, writing and math for 12 years until illness forced her to take a position as an academic inspector.
By then her writing was drawing attention. An essay she wrote about women’s inequality was published in a Senegalese magazine in 1952, and she began to realize the power of expression in writing.
She would go on to write novels that centered on an internal crisis she felt, torn between the traditional environment in which she grew up — her childhood home and family — and the progressive society that she yearned to see for women.
“At a time when we extolled the virtues of assimilation, I took a stand by rejecting it,” she said in the 1979 interview.
Her literary fame was cut short when she died of lung cancer on Aug. 17, 1981. She was 52.
Today, she is still regarded as a Senegalese pioneer who was fiercely outspoken about women’s rights.
“We must give, in African literature, to Black women a dimension commensurate with their commitment, alongside men, in the battles for liberation,” she said in a speech before Senegal’s National Assembly in 1979.
Her novels referred to the Islamic practice of polygamy as oppressive and misogynistic, and they struck a nerve in a Senegal that had only recently become untethered from French colonial rule.
In “So Long a Letter,” the narrator, Ramatoulaye Fall, writes letters to her friend Aïssatou Bâ in New York City. The novel explores their pain as their marriages fall apart. As Ramatoulaye grieves the death of her husband, Modou, she describes the turmoil she felt when he married a second woman without her consent. The book was seen by some as partly autobiographical: Bâ married and divorced three times.
“A woman is like a ball, whoever throws the ball cannot predict where it will bounce,” a neighbor tells Ramatoulaye in encouraging her to end her marriage. “He cannot control where it will roll, or who will grab it.”
Columbia University Libraries listed “So Long a Letter” as one of the 20th century’s 100 best books about Africa.
The French journalist Kidi Bebey wrote of the book in Le Monde in 2021: “By immersing us in the intimacy of the narrator, her joys, her sufferings and her frustrations, the novelist questions the female condition: the codes governing relationships with men, the importance of castes and, above all, polygamy. Ramatoulaye’s letter unfolds like the painful testimony of a well-read and idealistic woman, taken by surprise by the society in which she grew up.”
She died just before her second and final novel, “Un Chant Écarlate” (“A Scarlet Song”), was published. In it, a Frenchwoman, Mireille, marries a Senegalese man, Ousmane, and struggles with the clash between their cultures. Mireille is devastated when Ousmane begins to fall in love with a woman from his childhood, and a psychological breakdown leads her to act out violently.
While Bâ’s work has feminist undertones, scholars who have studied her life and work say she objected to being labeled a feminist and specifically rejected a Western notion often associated with white feminism — that women are superior to men.
Rather, Bâ wanted to embrace and advance an African worldview that embraced respect and equality between the sexes, as the scholar Chery Wall Staunton wrote in a 1994 paper. Yet Bâ acknowledged the limits of this mission.
She was aware that her writing was in French — a “borrowed language,” as Bâ put it — which her native audience may not have been able to read. (Her work was later translated to her native language, Wolof.)
“People must be cultured, instructed and educated, so that things can advance,” Bâ said during her Noma Award acceptance speech in 1980. “It touches me deeply. In spite of all the other things, in spite of wars, in spite of battles for a piece of land, in spite of all that, we can still have hope in humanity.”
Bâ’s influence extended beyond her writing. She founded Cercle Fémina, a feminist organization, and was a member of Dakar’s Soroptimist Club, a volunteer group that focuses on education and training for women and girls.
She married and divorced three times — unheard-of for women at the time — and had nine children.
In 1977, President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal named a school after her: the Maison d’Education Mariama Bâ, on Gorée, an island near Dakar that was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.
It was a fitting moment for Bâ, who, in “So Long a Letter,” reflected on the recognition women deserve.
“My heart rejoices each time a woman emerges from the shadows,” she wrote. “I know that the field of our gains is unstable, the retention of conquests difficult: Social constraints are ever-present, and male egoism resists.”
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