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Aoua Kéita and the Nascent Women's Movement in the French Soudan*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Jane Turrittin
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Extract

An intriguing, if little known, autobiography, Femme d'Afrique by Aoua Kéita (1975), is a valuable social document which allows us to reconstruct women's response to the independence movement in the French Soudan (now Mali). This response took the form of a nascent women's movement which emerged under the sponsorship of the Union Soudanaise du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (USRDA), an anticolonialist political party. Aoua Kéita's career as a pioneering midwife and political militant in the USRDA from 1931 to 1968 spanned the transition from colonial rule to independence in Mali (Morgenthau 1964; Foltz 1965).

Until recently, women were rarely included in scholarly discussions of African reactions to colonial rule. With few exceptions (Kanogo 1987; Ba 1989; Musisi 1991), most studies now available on the topic have been written by non-Africans and reflect the assumptions of western feminism (Riviére 1968; Dobert 1970; Van Allen 1974; Denzer 1976, 1981; Urdang 1979,1984; Rogers 1980; Geiger 1982, 1987; Johnson 1982; Mba 1982; O'Barr 1984; Wipper 1985; Cromwell 1986; Presley 1991). As an account by an African woman of the movement for independence in the French Soudan, Femme d'Afrique provides a welcome counterweight to discourse about third-world women by first-world women (Barthel 1975; Robertson 1984; Hay 1988; Staudt 1989).

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , April 1993 , pp. 59 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1993

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Oumar Dicko, Martin Klein, Nakanyiki Musisi, Kenna Owoh, Lynne Phillips, and four anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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