Women's Songs from West Africa

Introduction: New Perspectives on Women’s Songs and Singing in West Africa

Introduction j New Perspectives on Women’s Songs and Singing in West Africa Thomas A. Hale and Aissata G. Sidikou The essays in this volume are the result of research presented at a conference titled “Women’s Songs from West Africa” held at Princeton University. For the conference organizers, the event was the climax of a long effort to bring together researchers in a variety of disciplines who had worked for years and in some cases decades on song, a genre that reveals much about the world of women in West Africa. To a large extent, the focus of both the conference and the project out of which it grew was the content rather than the sound or form of these songs. Although it is difficult to dissociate form from meaning, both in song and in literature, the organizers, specialists in African literature and related fields, believe that song constitutes the most widespread form of verbal art produced by women in Africa. The lyrics cannot be ignored in our efforts to understand and communicate to others the richness of African literature today. The conference organizers embarked on this project after recording songs by women in West Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. Aissata G. Sidikou, author of Recreating Words, Reshaping Worlds: The Verbal Art of Women from Niger, Mali and Senegal (2001), collected songs in Niger and then compared them with lyrics sung by other women in Mali and Senegal that had been recorded and published by researchers as part of larger projects. Although other scholars have published works that include a focus on the songs of women in particular contexts—for example, Karin Barber’s landmark study of songs by Yoruba women, I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town (1991)—the study by Sidikou was the first to take a regional approach to the genre for woman singers. Thomas A. Hale, author of Griots and 2 Thomas A. Hale and Aissata G. Sidikou Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (1998), studied professional artisans of the word, both male and female, from a regional perspective in Niger, Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, and other Sahelian countries. Although he, too, recorded songs by women, and produced a short video about griottes in one country, Griottes of the Sahel: Female Keepers of the Songhay Oral Tradition in Niger, distributed by the Pennsylvania State University, his approach was focused as much on the history and social functions of the performers as on the lyrics. In the course of presentations of the results of their work at professional meetings, both Sidikou and Hale encountered other researchers—North American , European, and African—who were also studying songs by West African women. In some cases—for example, Beverly Mack of the University of Kansas and Susan Rasmussen from the University of Houston—these colleagues had been recording songs as well as other forms since the 1970s. The long-term efforts of these researchers yielded greater understanding of women’s complex and subtle roles in diverse societies as well as a corpus of many songs. But the outcomes of these projects remained to a large extent in isolation. For Beverly Mack, whose lifetime has been spent studying the verbal art, both oral and written, of Hausa women, it would have been impossible to carry out research of equal depth among, for example, a half-dozen other peoples in the region, because she would have had to learn many more languages —and devote several more lifetimes to the task. As significant as these ethno-specific analyses were for scholars interested in learning more about the lives of women in West Africa, there was a clear need for a complementary regional approach. In her comparisons of songs across the Sahel, Sidikou discovered differences rooted in culture as well as many similarities based on common concerns of women. In his study of griots and griottes in the same region, Hale encountered a similar phenomenon: many differences stemming from the diversity of cultures, but also similarities based on traditions that go back many centuries and span a vast area from Senegal to Lake Chad. It is because of these emerging regional similarities that we decided to limit the focus of this project to the Sahel region. It is made up of diverse peoples who nevertheless share common climatic, historical, and cultural experiences that include cycles of drought, the rise and fall of vast empires, highly stratified social structures, historical traditions maintained by griots, male and...