The Image of the African Woman in the Works of Birago Diop

Abstract

Education is a crucial liberating force in the lives of African women; it frees them from the shackles of tradition. In this wise, Birago Diop was an African man to the core who was brought up in a patriarchal society where women’s role are relegated to the background. Fortunately, Diop was influenced by his mother and grandmother at the outset which later conditioned him to literary career. In his creative works, he portrayed women as transmitter of folktales and moral values, yet most of his folktales portrayed the bad image of women in terms of ethics and behaviours. The paper sets out to ask some questions: Is Birago Diop an anti-feminist writer? Is the griot Amadou Koumba an anti-feminist writer? The work examines the role of African women in the upbringing of their children in all spheres of life and concludes that for any meaningful development to be achieved in training our younger generation, the role of women should not be ignored for it is generally believed that the woman herself is a school which if properly prepared, becomes a productive woman.