It is the little-known story of a generation of African pioneers, midwives and teachers, who became militants for independence and for the cause of women.
Among them, Jeanne Martin Cissé. Originally from Guinea, in 1972 she held the presidency of the UN Security Council as the permanent representative of her country, which was then a non-permanent member of the Council. She was born 46 years earlier at the time of French colonization, in the small town of Kankan.
In the early 1970s, she had been traveling the world for almost twenty years, familiar with UN bodies and international organizations. She left Africa for the first time in 1954, to go to Asnières, in the Paris region, delegated by the president of the Democratic Party of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, to a meeting of the French section of the International Democratic Federation of women (FDIF), an organization close to the communist movement.
The fight was then intense against the French colonial authorities. To publicize the battles fought in Africa, the one who was the tenth graduate teacher from her country also went to Austria, Hungary, China and even the USSR.
His trajectory, out of the ordinary, is however not unique. Women of her generation, trained by French colonizers to become teachers, midwives or nurses, crossed gender, class and racial boundaries to engage politically, despite the constraints that weighed on them.
By creating federal schools for girls in Senegal, those responsible for French colonial policy certainly did not aim to contribute to a transformation of social and gender roles.
On the contrary, it was a question of allowing young doctors, pharmacists, so-called “indigenous” teachers from the federations of French West (then Equatorial) Africa (AOF and AEF) to find wives “at their level”, to encourage them to form “evolved households” intermediate to the administration and devoted to the “mother country”.
The objective was also economic: in the absence of female teachers and health personnel in sufficient numbers, the training of local auxiliaries at a lower cost would make it possible to combat illiteracy and the high rates of maternal and infant mortality. .
Thus, between 1918 and 1957 (when the last cohorts of midwives and teachers left) the Dakar School of Medicine and the Rufisque Normal School of Teachers took in 1,286 young girls, of which 990 graduated: 633 midwives, 63 visiting nurses and 294 teachers.
During a training of three or four years in boarding school, under the more or less benevolent and authoritarian guidance of French directors, these young girls from the different colonies that made up French West Africa (AOF) forged close ties of camaraderie, also based on the feeling of belonging to a very small minority whose room for maneuver was limited but real.
These women were inserted into the larger network of literate men whose names have been recorded in history. They thus rubbed shoulders with Félix Houphouët-Boigny, first president of Côte d’Ivoire, Modibo Keita, former teacher who led his country to independence, champion of Pan-Africanism, president of the Federation of Mali in the 1950s, Mamadou Dia, first Minister of Senegal who opposed Léopold Sédar Senghor, or the Senegalese writer Abdoulaye Sadji.
These first promotions of “learned women” shook up the hierarchies. Rare at the time, they first left their families to continue their education in Senegal. Their first journeys, from Dahomey (present-day Benin), Guinea or Niger to reach Dakar and, not far away, Rufisque, are a major stage in their formation, like a first moment of opening up to the world.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, when colonized peoples’ access to citizenship was the subject of intense debate and demands for reform multiplied, they participated with their brothers, fathers and husbands in the fight against the colonizers. , trying to lead the anti-colonial struggle and the fight for women’s rights.
For this generation of women, who never define themselves as feminists, the challenge is twofold: to fight racial inequalities and to claim more rights as women. The first objective takes precedence. It is first to claim equality between whites and blacks, between colonizers and colonized, to denounce colonial violence and then to obtain independence, that these women get involved.
Most of them joined the Rassemblement Démocratique Africaine (RDA), the main opposition party to the colonial authorities founded in October 1946. They found a place there, between participation in mixed mobilizations and the formation of independent if not autonomous women’s committees.
Their education leads them to occupy the functions of secretaries or treasurers of the women’s sections of the party. In French Sudan (present-day Mali), the midwife Aoua Keita joined the RDA in 1946, and founded the first Nara women’s committee in 1949.
Teachers preside over the sub-sections of the RDA in the towns where they are assigned. Some joined trade unions at the same time, such as Nima Bâ who joined the teachers’ union in Guinea at the end of the 1940s. She explains that she was called in because she had “a certain level”.
Some are active in mainland France, such as Jacqueline Coulibaly, a student at the Sorbonne, who joined in 1954 alongside Joseph Ki-Zerbo, who became her husband, in the Federation of Black African Students in France (FEANF). Her stances reveal the dilemmas facing women of her generation. In Tam Tamthe newsletter of African Catholic students, she wrote in 1956:
“The real problem is the search for a synthesis of Western elements and African customs, the search for a means of integrating the instruction given in schools with the traditional elements of family education. as Africans, boys as well as girls, become aware of this problem, they will necessarily understand that they must choose the best of what the West brings them and keep what can and must be saved from ancestral traditions. “
Defending access to education, fighting excision, early or forced marriages and above all polygamy is often seen as a betrayal of African cultures. The first graduates, often accused of being a small westernized bourgeois minority and disconnected from reality, attempt a difficult synthesis.
Jeanne Chapman, a teacher since 1944 in a school in the popular district of Treichville, in Abidjan, condemned polygamy in 1960 by comparing men to roosters in a barnyard (FraternityJanuary 1960) but called a year later for the invention of a “Negro-Western civilisation” (Abidjan MorningApril 9, 1961).
This balancing act that claims equal rights on the basis of complementary social roles between men and women is built in connection with an international militancy that they are the first women in Africa to experience.
In the careers of these pioneers, the fact of participating in international congresses, of leaving their country and sometimes the continent to meet women from the rest of the world is decisive in the construction of a militant discourse.
In 1949, Célestine Ouezzin Coulibaly, who was not a former “normalienne” but a teaching instructor, was delegated by her companions to go to Beijing, to the congress of the International Democratic Federation of Women.
She returns determined to fight for more rights. Jeanne Martin Cissé is struck by the spirit of solidarity that reigns between the women present at the FDIF congress in Asnières, whether they come from the West Indies, Africa or Indochina. She discovers “new perspectives” and feels better informed, as she writes in Milo’s daughter (African Presence, 2009).
Two years later, in June 1956, the first World Conference of Working Women organized by the World Federation of Trade Unions in Budapest provided Jeanne Martin Cissé with the opportunity to meet the Malian teacher Aïssata Sow Coulibaly.
In Vienna, in June 1958, at the IVth Congress of the FDIF, a small group of African delegates from Senegal, Mali, but also Cameroon and Madagascar denounced colonial oppression but also reflected on the need to unite their forces. across West Africa, if not the entire continent.
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The project came to fruition four years later, in 1962, in Dar es-Salaam, the capital of the future Tanzania. It was there that some thirty representatives from 21 countries from both the north and south of the continent took part in the first African Women’s Conference, later called the Pan-African.
Among them, teachers and midwives represent 11 of the 18 members of the various delegations from the former French colonies. Jeanne Martin Cissé becomes the Secretary General of the organization which has its headquarters in Bamako, the capital of Mali.
In a magazine interview Awathe magazine for black women, the first issue of which appeared in January 1964, it insists on the need for African women to make their voices heard, in dialogue with women all over the world.
This article is published as part of the symposium “African Modernities. Conversations, circulations, decentrings”, which takes place from June 9 to 11, 2022 at ENS-PSL, on the Jourdan and Ulm campuses. Find here the program of these exchanges.
Pascale Barthélémy, Lecturer in contemporary history, ENS of Lyon
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.