Africa's women rarely are heard in the West. To give these women voice, Aminatta Forna strides two cultures -- her father's Sierra Leone and her mother's Scotland -- resurrecting women's stories drawn from the deep West African well of what Ms. Forna calls the joys of oral history.

Ms. Forna was already known to BBC viewers when she introduced herself to readers with a memoir of her family, deeply intertwined with Sierra Leone's troubled history. In the process, the richness and depth of Sierra Leone's past captivated Ms. Forna. From that interest, both she and her extended family have been rescuing an ancient way of life from the intrusions of colonialism. And it all began with listening.

African culture, it turns out, is much more open to the idea of strong women than is the West, Ms. Forna declares unequivocally. It's a relief to be allowed to be oneself, she says, delighted that she does not have to temper herself when she is in Sierra Leone nearly as much as she does in Europe.

First, the successful memoir resulted in Ms. Forna and her grandfather's village joining forces to build a school which has now had its first graduation. Then, while expanding her writerly reach into fiction, based on stories she has collected mostly from older women, art and life began to merge. By the end of what became Ancestor Stones, Ms. Forna and her Temne family were reclaiming her grandfather's plantation from the forest, now producing cashews instead of coffee.

So what is it that Aminatta Forna has heard with all of her listening? People's similarities far outweigh our differences, she has concluded after a lifetime living amidst two very different cultures. And yet, stories of those things which are different can seem very different indeed to Westerners...stories of freedoms seldom found in the West, like women who can -- and do -- elect to become men. And vice versa. Or a woman's right, after her husband's death, to become a "praying wife" and choose, if she'd like, to marry another woman.

Or consider this. In Temne culture (her father's people), a man cannot divorce his wife on grounds of adultery, though he can if she does not perform her wifely duties well around the house. Further, when a wife takes a lover, the husband is expected to look the other way, the wife to be discrete, and everyone understands that any child is considered the husband's.

And what of the stones which Ms. Forna immortalizes in her fiction's title story? They once linked the women of Sierra Leone to their mothers and their mothers' mothers' mothers. So what happens when a husband, newly converted to Islam, throwing those stones away? It's painfully easy to guess.

Of the many challenges emerging from Ms. Forna's beautiful, poignant, devastating and important stories, she considers the most important one that which she and her father's village are addressing together:  People breaking the colonial mentality (in exactly the way that Frans Fanon meant it, she says) that results from taking away a person's and a people's ability to self-determine.

 

[This Program was recorded September 25, 2006, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.]