“How can Eve in the bible be born from a man when biologically a man is born from woman?” Tracing feminist struggles in the colonial period and 1980s Yewwu-Yewwi feminist movement in Senegal

abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century in Casamance, southern Senegal, a young woman with healing powers named Alandisso Bassene opened a shrine, and would quickly amass a following of both men and women. A clash with missionaries and French colonial administration would result in ‘the most acclaimed witch doctor’ being imprisoned for the next 15 years in 1919. Six decades later, in 1984, a new radical feminist movement in Senegal, Yewwu-Yewwi for Women’s Liberation, emerged and challenged the hierarchical relationship between men and women, denouncing patriarchy, with a brand of feminism that echoed global feminism. In an interview with the state newspaper Le Soleil in 1986, Marie Angélique Savane, the leader of Yewwu-Yewwi, described feminism as the awareness of inequality of the sexes and denouncing injustice against women despite them ‘carrying humanity’ and being a dynamic and progressive force (Fall 1986a). This article studies the historical narratives of mediumship, priestesses, shrines and their followers in southern Senegal during the colonial period, where power circulates, and the feminist thought of Yewwu-Yewwi, where the lack of power held by women is addressed in the language of equality and rights.

keywords:

• transnational feminism
• Yewwu-Yewwi
• Senegal
• priestesses
• patriarchy

Notes

1 From an interview with Yewwu-Yewwi leader Marie-Angélique Savané where she critiques religious patriarchy in daily newspaper, Le Soleil, Friday 18 July 1986.

2 Oral interview in Casamance by Bassene in 2006. Philippe Meguelle speaks of the good relationship between Alandisso and the army at the time.

3 Aline Sitoe is a famous figure from the colonial period, a rainmaker, whose community support of her powers gave her regional fame. She would ask the community not to pay colonial taxes and only to plant local rice, resulting in the colonial government fighting her, imprisoning her and exiling her.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Haydée Bangerezako

HAYDÉE BANGEREZAKO is an assistant professor and researcher in the history department at the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (UCAD), Senegal. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Social Studies from the Makerere Institute of Social Studies at Makerere University. Haydée lectures in historical theory and methods and feminist history at UCAD. Her research interest is in a feminist critique of the conceptual aspects of historical narratives, as well as its decolonisation focusing on institutions, oral archives and gender. She is currently researching female priestesses and their shrines to study the relationship between mediumship and the political. Email: [email protected]

Pape Chérif Bertrand Bassene

PAPE CHÉRIF BERTRAND BASSÈNE holds a PhD in history from Laval University, Quebec, and the European University of Southern Brittany in France and is a researcher and lecturer at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. His interests are in the historical development of West Africa (Senegambia), and the ‘transatlantic-Saharan’ context, marked by slavery and the slave trade and its memory. He is the author of several articles, and highlights the issue of colonial treaties and the manifestation of the state in former colonies in his book Histoire authentique de la Casamance (2011). Email: [email protected]