Mariama Bâ

Mariama Bâ (born 1929 in Dakar , Senegal ; died 1981 in Dakar) was a Senegalese writer . She belonged to the Fulbe people .

Life

Coming from a traditionally Islamic family, she attended a French school after her mother's death. In 1943 she moved to the École normal de Rufisque , a secondary educational school in Rufisque , which she left in 1947 with a degree as a teacher. In the following 12 years she devoted herself to her profession, then applied for a transfer to the regional school authority for health reasons.

Divorced from her husband, the MP Obèye Diop, the mother of nine children was involved in women's associations and advocated education and women's rights with a series of speeches and articles in local newspapers.

Her first novel Une si longue lettre ( Such a long letter ) immediately won the Noma Prize for African Literature when it was published in 1980 .

She died of cancer the following year, shortly before her second novel was published.

Her novels deal with the social conditions in their environment and the resulting problems, such as polygamy , the caste system , oppression of women - in her first novel - or family resistance and culture shock in intercultural marriages - in her second novel.

Appreciation

A secondary school in Dakar (Maison d'éducation Mariama Bâ) and a public square in Bene Baraque are named after her, as is a street in Ginsheim-Gustavsburg .

It was included in the anthology Daughters of Africa , edited in 1992 by Margaret Busby in London and New York.

Works

• Une si longue lettre, Roman, 1979 (Such a long letter)
• La fonction politique des littératures africaines écrites, 1981 (The political function of written African literature)
• Un chant écarlate , Roman, Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, Dakar / Abidjan / Lome 1981
  • German: The scarlet song , from the French by Irmgard Rathke, with an afterword by Ulla Schild, series: The woman in society; Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1984 ISBN 3-596-23746-7 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ List of the winners of the Noma Award ( Memento of the original from December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 1, 2015 
2. ^ Inauguration: New names for the resilient quartier. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on December 22, 2015 ; accessed on September 18, 2014 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• Literature by and about Mariama Bâ in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography ( Memento of March 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive )