Mariama Bâ was born in 1929 in Dakar, Senegal, then part of French West Africa. She came from a prominent Lebu family: her father, Amadou Bâ, was a civil servant who became one of independent Senegal’s first ministers, serving as Minister of Health in 1956 (Europeana). Her mother died when she was young, and she was raised by her maternal grandmother in a devout Muslim household.
Bâ’s childhood balanced two worlds—a modern father who believed in education and a grandmother steeped in tradition. Her grandmother trained her in the duties of a wife, while her father pushed her to continue studying against the elders’ wishes (The Paris Review).
A gifted student, Bâ won first place in the entrance examination to the École Normale de Rufisque, an elite teacher-training college for girls near Dakar, achieving the highest score in French West Africa (The Paris Review). She graduated in 1947 as a certified teacher (Encyclopedia.com). At a time when few Senegalese girls were allowed beyond primary school, her success was exceptional.
Bâ taught in local schools before becoming a regional school inspector in the 1950s. She married and had nine children. Her marriage to politician Obèye Diop lasted 25 years but ended in divorce (The Paris Review). As a single mother in a patriarchal society, Bâ faced enormous pressure, yet this struggle strengthened her resolve to expose the injustices faced by women (SA History Online).
By the 1970s, Bâ was a public advocate for women’s rights, publishing essays in newspapers and involved in organisations such as the Dakar Soroptimist Club and the Cercle Fémina. She wrote against polygamy and the unequal treatment of women, calling for girls’ education (Encyclopedia.com). Although she avoided the label “feminist”, which she viewed as foreign, her commitment to women’s freedom underlined her life’s work.
Bâ’s literary breakthrough came late in life. At 50, she published Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter) in 1979 (The Paris Review). Written in French, it won the inaugural Noma Award for Publishing in Africa the following year (Encyclopedia.com). The novel takes the form of a letter written by Ramatoulaye, a widowed schoolteacher, to her friend Aissatou.
Through that letter, Ramatoulaye speaks of her husband, Modou, who, after 25 years of marriage, took a younger second wife and abandoned her and their children. She is distraught but refuses to remarry her late husband’s brother, defying custom and asserting her right to independence.
Bâ used the intimacy of the letter to give voice to what was usually unspoken. In many African societies, women shared their feelings privately in letters and confidences; Bâ transformed that private form into public truth (Reading Under the Olive Tree).
Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter) was a sensation.
Senegalese women recognised themselves in the characters.
Some hailed it as the first great feminist novel of Francophone Africa; others accused Bâ of importing Western ideas (The Paris Review). She responded simply: “I speak as an African woman” (Document Women).
So Long a Letter was translated into more than a dozen languages and became a staple in universities across Africa, Europe, and the United States. It remains a foundational text of African literature—a novel that revealed, in her words, “the cry of women everywhere”.
Her second novel, Un chant écarlate (Scarlet Song), appeared in 1981 shortly after her death. It tells of Ousmane, a Senegalese man, and Mireille, a French diplomat’s daughter, whose interracial marriage collapses under cultural pressure and betrayal. When Ousmane takes a second wife, sanctioned by tradition, Mireille spirals into madness. Their story ends in tragedy—a symbol of love destroyed by history and hierarchy.
If So Long a Letter explored the endurance of African women, Scarlet Song exposed the emotional wreckage left by colonialism and patriarchy. Together, they show how public systems of power and old, unquestioned traditions invade and destroy the private lives of women.
Throughout her work, Bâ confronted how post-colonial nations, newly independent, still confined women to inherited roles. She called for selective reform—to keep what was valuable in tradition but reject what oppressed (SA History Online). Her outlook was close to womanism: a distinctly African humanism that sought equality without severing ties to community and faith.
Bâ’s fiction was inseparable from her life. Like her heroine Ramatoulaye, Bâ was an educated Muslim woman who endured betrayal in marriage and redefined herself as a mother and teacher (SA History Online). Ultimately, her stories revealed women’s ability to survive betrayal and pain.
In 1977, President Léopold Senghor established the Mariama Bâ Boarding School on Gorée Island, named in her honour. On this island once eviscerated by the slave trade, this school now educates Senegal’s most promising young women, standing as a monument to her belief that education was the first act of liberation.
Bâ died of cancer in 1981 at 52. She left only two novels and a handful of essays, yet transformed African letters. So Long a Letter became the cornerstone of women’s writing on the continent and inspired authors such as Aminata Sow Fall, Buchi Emecheta, and Tsitsi Dangarembga (Qiraat African).
Bâ’s work remains deeply relevant. Polygamy, the custom she critiqued, is still legal in Senegal. In 2024, the country’s new president reignited national debate by publicly acknowledging his two wives (StratNews Global). Bâ’s vision foresaw such struggles, warning that equality could not exist without confronting the politics of family and intimacy (SA History Online).
Bâ once said that “books are “weapons”—peaceful ones, but capable of reshaping society. Her weapon was the letter: intimate, deliberate, revealing. From that private act of writing, Mariama Bâ gave voice to generations of women who suffer in silence.
Next week: Part Seven of Women Writers Out of Africa
IRA MATHUR is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
