Women's Songs from West Africa

15 - Lamentation and Politics in a Sahelian Song

15 j Lamentation and Politics in a Sahelian Song Thomas A. Hale Researchers in a variety of disciplines who have recorded songs by women from West Africa are now providing evidence for this most widespread but also most ephemeral form of expression by women. The research leads to several questions . Is there any way of documenting the existence and the roles of women singers in the pre-independence era? Did they have a public voice? If so, what were women doing and saying with their songs? In the introduction to the collection of songs published in Women’s Voices from West Africa (2011), Aissata G. Sidikou and I included a history of the genre that began with the lyrics of an Egyptian love song dating to 1300 bce. Since that period, it is difficult to find references to women singers, let along lyrics, although in the Sahel one finds mention of them in the fourteenth century. The North African traveler Ibn Battuta described singers at the court of Mansa Suleyman, ruler of the Mali empire, in 1352–1353 (Hamdun and King 1975). But in the history that followed, though there are numerous references to singers, one encounters no lyrics until 1918. Below is a summary of sources described in more detail in the introduction to Women’s Voices from West Africa. In the Tarîkh el-Fettâch (Kâti 1913) and the Tarîkh es-Soudan (es-Sa’di 1964 [1898–1900]), long narratives composed in Arabic by scribes in Timbuktu in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are a few brief descriptions of women singing during the time of the Songhay empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As is the case with the performers for Suleyman Mansa in 1352, women are cited as performing at the court of rulers of the Songhay empire. 258 Thomas A. Hale This image of women as performers for important audiences and major events appears in the account of Michel Jajolet de La Courbe, who was the local director of the Compagnie du Sénégal in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He describes a performance for him by a tiggiwit, or Moor griotte, but even though he comments on the style of her singing, he is not able to transcribe and translate the lyrics sung in Hassâniya Arabic. He also describes Wolof women singing to mark the end of Ramadan, but again there are no lyrics (La Courbe 1913). A century later, in 1784–1785, a French naval officer named De Lajaille (1802) witnessed griottes singing to celebrate evidence of the virginity of a newlywed woman. At the same time, Lamiral (1789), a former slave trader, described the dances of women, but does not mention the message of their songs. In the early-nineteenth-century narratives of a French army engineer named Silvestre Golberry (1808) we do learn about griottes as historians, but not about the subject of their songs. The traveler Anne Raffenel included a sketch of a griotte in a volume of drawings published in 1846. Three decades later, a photographer assigned to an expedition heading into the interior of the Sahel in what is known today as Mali took a photo of the wife of an interpreter and her griotte (Hale 1998). These references, verbal and visual, are all interesting because they tell us about the functions of these women and also about their social status, but none of the reporters had the means or the interest to record, transcribe, and translate songs. Not long after the turn of the twentieth century, however, a song published in 1918 offers an example of verbal art by a woman that is significant for several reasons. First, it is the earliest song in print by a woman that we have been able to find. Second, in its lyrics one finds both a lamentation, a genre that is common to women, and sharp criticism of two leaders for the way they carried out one of their most important roles in society, that of defending their people. Men are frequent subjects of songs by women, but the context is often courtship, marriage, some other aspect of domestic life, or praise for the achievements of heroes. Third, the song offers an excellent example of intergenerational solidarity . Although this tradition is not rare, in assembling the collection of songs that appeared in Women’s Voices from West Africa we came across many that expressed conflict between young women and their elders. Often...