Niger and Sarraounia: One Hundred Years of Forgetting Female Leadership

Used generically, Sarraounia (Hausa for “queen” or “female chief”) may designate various functions of female leadership. Among the Azna of Lougou, Bagagi, and surrounding Hausa villages and towns of the Mawri group—predominantly animist until recently—this title refers especially to a female lineage that held noncentralized political and religious authority. But religious authority has long become the only remaining, and contested, prerogative of the Sarraounia. History books, which are far too few, largely ignore the queens, priestesses, and female chiefs of the recent past, thus depriving Niger of powerful national female role models. While it pretends to concede equitable gender representation in parliament and politics, Niger’s government constantly defers the promulgation of a “Family Code,” and its proponents are threatened with divine sanction by certain Islamic religious authorities.