Women's Songs from West Africa Give Public Voice to the Women
April 24, 2003
University Park, Pa. --- Women's songs from West Africa are the focus of a three-day conference sponsored by Princeton University in cooperation with Pennsylvania State University May 2-4 at the Princeton campus. Participants will examine women's use of songs to express themselves publicly in a society in which men have traditionally dominated the public arena and women's voices have been confined to the domestic sphere.
A distinctive feature of the conference will be a concert by women singers from Guinea and Mali Saturday, May 3, at 8 p.m. in Taplin Auditorium, Fine Hall.
Dr. Thomas A. Hale, the Liberal Arts Professor of African, French and Comparative Literature at Penn State and Head of the Department of French, and Dr. Aissata Sidikou-Morton, assistant professor of French at Princeton and a Penn State graduate, are coordinating the conference and concert which mark the mid-point of a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research project.
The goal is to find out what women from the patriarchal and Islamic region of the Sahel -- a wide swath of largely dry land that stretches from Senegal eastward toward Lake Chad in West Africa -- are saying in a medium that allows them a public voice. Evidence of women singing songs in a variety of genres dates to the 14th century. Today, women express their views in songs while participating in meal preparation, childcare, naming ceremonies, weddings and other activities. Some songs are as gentle as lullabies while the words of others frighten men who happen to hear them.
Twenty scholars from Africa, Europe, and North America will present the results of their research. Hale and Sidikou-Morton will edit the papers, publish an anthology of songs, and co-author a synthesis of current research on women's songs from West Africa.
For example, Marame Gueye, a Senegalese graduate student at SUNY Binghamton, will report on a corpus of wedding songs she recorded last summer in Senegal. Gueye has a privileged perspective on the songs because she is descended from a family of griots and griottes, male and female professional keepers of the oral tradition in the Sahel. The songs she collected convey a striking sense of freedom on the part of the singers-freedom to sing about sexuality, relations between the bride and her in-laws, and appropriate behavior of husbands.
A Dutch researcher, Kirsten Langeveld, will report on a collection of songs sung by women in southern Senegal who are infertile. The songs show how these women undergo a ritual identity change in order take up a new position in the social structure. American professor Louise Bourgault will present both a paper and a video on how professional women singers, known in Mali as jelimusow, educate the public with songs about AIDS.
While the focus of most research is on songs that were recorded within the last three decades, Hale's paper will frame the subject of women singers in a historical context that dates back to the 14th century. The first written evidence of women singing songs in the Sahel appears in an Arabic account by Ibn Battuta, the famous Berber traveler from Tangiers. He visited the court of Mali in 1352 and later described how male and female professional singers remind the ruler of Mali of the need to match the deeds of his ancestors.
Penn State sponsors of the conference include the College of the Liberal Arts and the Comparative Literature Department. Sponsors from Princeton include the Office of the President, the Department of French and Italian, the Department of Music, the Program in African Studies, the Department of History and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.
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