Development, Modernism and Modernity in Africa by Augustine Agwuele

Author:Augustine Agwuele [Agwuele, Augustine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415719629
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2013-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

10 Re-Imagining West African

Women’s Sexuality

Bekolo’s Les Saignantes and

the Mevoungou1

Naminata Diabate

Jean Pierre Bekolo’s third feature film, Les Saignantes, is one of the best-known West African films.2 Les Saignantes (The bloodletters) reveals Bekolo’s scathing political critique of the postcolonial ruling class. But the film does more than critique the failed dreams of decolonization because it also reimagines an empowering image of West African women’s sexuality. In so doing, retrieving the Mevoungou, an important precolonial ritual of the powerful female secret society of the Beti of Cameroon the film gives women’s rites the power to heal the postcolonial state. The main characters, two young and sexy women, exchange sexual favors with highly influential male state officials for business contracts. However, the corrupt state of the country requires the intervention of the secret society whose power is predicated upon the clitoris. Unbeknownst to the young women, the spirit of the Mevoungou takes possession of their bodies to purify and heal the state. Thus, while executing this social and political mission, the protagonists also go through a ritual of purification and subsequently become empowered women. It is the female characters’ assertion of the constructive powers of their sexuality that makes Les Saignantes a compelling film.

Such images of women’s empowerment are relatively rare in West African literature and film, and even rarer in scholarship, where African women’s bodies constitute the fundamental site of their subjugation: “The Body, the most visible difference between man and woman, the only one to offer a secure ground for those who seek the permanent, the feminine ‘nature’ and ‘essence,’ remains thereby the safest basis for racist and sexist ideologies.”3 Thus, a certain ambivalence defines the nature of the female body, because it is simultaneously a site of women’s subjugation and one of their most available avenues of resistance against local and foreign patriarchal constraints.4 This seemingly contradictory nature of the body problematizes the exclusive signs of pathology that early European modernist ideology assigned to black women’s bodies.

This chapter explores the processes associated with modernity that exiled African women from their bodies, and the social, political, and historical imperative of reimagining postcolonial women as in possession of an empowering sexuality. In the process, I also examine the film’s adaptation of the precolonial female genital ritual, analyzing the uses to which the director puts an extinct ritual. The cinematic adaptation is compelling because nineteenth-century German missionaries abolished most Beti indigenous rituals, including the Mevoungou. Not only were Beti women deprived of some of their cultural avenues of empowerment, but also they and African women in general have been buried under palimpsestic layers of discursive and nondiscursive practices that pathologize and attempt to silence them.

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