SO LONG A LETTER. By Mariama Ba

What price the lot of African women under what has been patent patriarchal domination for years on end? Or specifically the plight of Moslem women in the continent? Of course this work excellently deals with this, and has rightly been considered something of a masterpiece for decades now. The author- now late- knew the subject matter inside out, and her 'long letter ' here to a female friend lays everything bare. How does a woman feel after being shoved aside by her husband for a very young woman, one who could easily have been her own daughter in age? What can a woman do? How does she bear the comprehensive humiliation? How does she survive? How does she hold onto her own children - no longer kids - and still endeavour to bring them up the right way? This magnificent work illuminates all this with monumental empathy and pathos in its stride. 

The author is a superb writer, and introspective and quite blunt to boot. She is aware of her status as an African woman who has had 12 children! But she is still very much a woman. As she writes later on in this work, "...I said it teasingly, rolling my eyes round. Eternal woman, even in mourning, you want to make a strike, you want to seduce, arouse interest" . Her excellent narrative certainly arouses our interest, which include the vagaries of her own brood. We share her shock as she suddenly discovers one of her own daughter smoking: "... A woman's mouth exhaling the acrid smell of tobacco instead of being fragrant.  A woman's teeth blackened with tobacco instead of sparkling with whiteness' Despite her apparent broad-mindedness and stoic approach, one cannot but wish our narrator all the best...