Big mouth: amplified feminism in Guinea

ABSTRACT

In January 2019, the Guinean journalist and feminist activist, Moussa Yéro Bah, was found guilty in a defamation suit. The suit involved a clip on her radio news program, in which she spoke about an ongoing rape case. While she never named the alleged perpetrator, his identity was well known on the street and in social media. He promptly sued Ms. Bah, and won. In this article, I explore this case and activists’ reactions to it, to consider how voice, sound, and listening shape responses to sexual violence. I examine the role of amplification in feminist struggles for gender justice in Guinea and analyse the sound effects of a series of vocal interventions by activists and journalists. My analysis explores how vocal practices, audio technologies, and ways of hearing shape both legal and extra-legal proceedings. As I show, activists strategically sound out their claims in everyday spaces in order to bypass the failures of formal legal systems and create possibilities for more collective, transformative action.

KEYWORDS:

• Amplification
• shame
• sexual violence
• law
• radio
• feminism
• voice
• Guinea

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the dear friends and colleagues in Guinea who have generously shared their worlds with me and who lead by fearless, tireless example: Moussa Yéro Bah, Halimatou Camara, Hadja Idrissa Bah, Kadiatou Diallo, Asmao Barry, Ramatoulaye Sow and others. My deep gratitude to Bremen Donovan for her brilliance and collaboration on the Big Mouth film project, and to Anne Coughlin and Bonnie Gordon for their invaluable support, conversation and community around this work. I sincerely thank the journal editor and the anonymous readers, whose insightful comments and suggestions have greatly improved this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Examples include anti-rape organisations such as Our Voice and Voices of Hope, campaigns such as Raise Your Voice and Your Voice Has Power, and Nadya Ali’s 2016 film, Breaking Silence.

2. Personal communication, 11^th December 2017.

3. Respect and social status have conventionally been linked to quietness and discretion in West Africa. For this reason, leaders would traditionally have (lower-status) hereditary orators speak publicly on their behalf.

4. Bellita Banda-Chitsamatanga and Nomthandazo Ntlama survey female South African university students, who express frustration at disciplinary inaction against sexual violence and call on universities to publicly name perpetrators (Banda-Chitsamatanga and Ntlama 2020, 16409).

5. As Tsitsi Ella Jaji further notes, women have long been targeted as modern consumers of audio technologies in West Africa. Audio manufacturers sought to cultivate a “discerning sensorium” in West African women, not as political agents but as avid spenders (Jaji 2014, 141).

6. Schulz’s analysis draws attention to the separation between voice and body that radio allows. As she notes, traditional social arrangements in West Africa meant that hereditary orators, or jeliw (Guinean Maninka, jelilu) spoke for, but in close physical proximity to, rulers and nobles. It was this proximity that made the speech reliable and authoritative, while also subjecting jeliw to accusations of shamelessness and opportunism. Schulz argues that postcolonial practices of state-sponsored radio broadcasting linked ambivalence towards jeliw with ambivalence to the new “[d]isembodied praise” of radio broadcasts (Schulz 2012, 33–4). Women, who sang most of the praise songs aired on radio, were particularly criticised for their corruption and immodesty (ibid, 34).

7. Personal communication, 2^nd December 2020. In 2019 alone, six journalists were arrested for defamation in Guinea. “Liberté de Presse: Un journaleux en taule pour diffamation”, Le Lynx, 27 March 2019; accessed at https://lelynx.net/2019/03/liberte-de-presse-un-journaleux-en-taule-pour-diffamation/.

8. The judge ordered Ms. Bah to pay one million GNF in court fees and twenty-five million GNF (about $2500 at time of writing) in damages to the plaintiff.

9. For instance, the state has never prosecuted perpetrators nor provided reparations for survivors of a 2009 mass rape, in which soldiers gang-raped female protesters (Dave 2020, 151–3).

10. Corinne Dufka, “Guinea’s Efforts to Ban Protests Undermines Rights”, Human Rights Watch, 26 April 2019; accessed at https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/04/26/guineas-efforts-ban-protests-undermines-rights.

11. Such criticisms date back to Guinea’s first president, Sékou Touré, who argued that feminism had little relation to African realities. In part, Touré’s critique of Euro-American feminism corresponds closely with fourth-wave feminism and concerns about the exclusivity of earlier phases that greatly centred on white, middle class women. Touré argues that Euro-American feminism was a failure because it overlooked questions of class (Touré 1967, 286–7).

12. A discussion of queer voices is beyond the scope of this paper but represents an important area for further consideration.

13. Braithwaite briefly refers to the possibilities of public shaming as a means to reshape shared ideas about law and rights, particularly citing feminist campaigns against sexual harassment, marital rape, and employment discrimination (Braithwaite 1989, 79).

14. While further discussion of the survivor is beyond the scope of this article, I am exploring these questions in a film project, co-produced with Bremen Donovan and in collaboration with Moussa Yéro Bah, Halimatou Camara, and others. Questions of ambiguity, expressivity, and agency are also central to a forthcoming collection of essays on the project, in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nomi Dave

Nomi Dave is a former lawyer, interdisciplinary researcher, Associate Professor of Music and co-director of the Sound Justice Lab at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea (Chicago, 2019), which was awarded the Ruth Stone Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. With Bremen Donovan, she is currently co-directing and co-writing a documentary film, Big Mouth, on defamation and sexual violence in Guinea.