Mariama Bâ’s only poem “Festac…Souvenirs De Lagos” (“Festac…Memories of Lagos”) has been discovered by French literary scholar Tobias Warner, 46 years after it was published in L’Ouest Africain, a newspaper publication owned by her husband, Obèye Diop.
The Senegalese feminist author is widely known for her critically acclaimed novels So Long A Letter and Scarlet Song published in 1979 and 1981 respectively, and is greatly revered till this day as one of the foundational voices in African literature.
Her most notable work So Long A Letter, initially published in French Une si Longue Lettre is said to be one of the most translated pieces of African Literature of the 20th century, and played a pivotal role in the portrayal of African women in African Literature.
However, before Bâ would go on to write her most famous work, a trip to Nigeria representing L’Ouest Africain in the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) birthed the poem that has gone undiscovered all these years. Warner discovered the poem after he came across a reference to the trip in an understudied biogriaphy Mariama Bâ; ou, Les allées d’un Destin (Mariama Ba; or, The Alleys of Destiny) written by Ba’s daughter, Mame Coumbs Ndiaye. He thereafter made a request to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for publications from 1977 written on FESTAC, with specifics on Mariama Bâ, in his article, he explained that the liberians had not found an article written by Mariama Ba but had found one written by a Mariama Diop.
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