Books
Breaking tradition: The political landscape shifts for women in Niger
When Ousseina Alidou returned to her native Niger in 1993 after earning a doctorate from Indiana University, she noticed the stirrings of social change within the country’s patriarchal society. On this and subsequent trips, she saw women behaving in ways that were previously unheard of: selling homemade incense to support their families, calling into radio programs to discuss the lack of women in government, singing songs about politically charged issues, such as HIV/AIDS. Young girls were studying religious texts in Qur’anic schools.
Alidou recognized the cultural and political significance of these shifts and set out to document them in “Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). At Rutgers, Alidou is an associate professor of linguistics in the Department of Africana studies. She directs the department’s program in African languages and literature and is the acting undergraduate director of its program in comparative literature. Alidou was honored in 2005 with a Rutgers Board of Trustee Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, citing her contributions in linguistics and women's studies.
Based on fieldwork conducted in Niger between 1994 and 2002, the book examines how Muslim women in Niger engage in actions and initiatives in reaction to their inferior social status. Alidou blends the biography of three women with sociological data, social theory and linguistic analysis to present a multidimensional glimpse of political Islam, education, popular culture, and military rule.
Niger, a nation comprised of 95 percent Muslims, has an estimated population of 10 million. After gaining its independence from France in 1960, the country had a 15-year civilian rule followed by military regimes from 1990-1994. Due to internal and Western pressures, Niger became democratic in the mid-1990s. Today, Islam remains a force in government policy.
“The overreaching concern of my research has been with how the status and roles of Muslim women in Niger have changed as a result of local and global processes and how women have responded,” Alidou said. Under colonial rule, for example, girls were not formally educated; the focus for them was domesticity. One of the book’s subjects, Malama A’ishatu, a woman in her 70s, could not attend the French colonial school of her brothers. But her father allowed her to listen to religious lessons at an all-boy Qur’anic school following household chores each day. She learned to read the Qur’an, which changed the trajectory of her life, and now runs a Qur’anic school for women and girls.
“By sheer luck, Malama A’ishatu evolved to become a great poet and a religious commentator that the nation needed in the ‘90s, when the democratization process allowed women to come on television as religious commentators,” Alidou said. “Even women like her before were not being counted as influential individuals. Women are doing things now that must be appreciated and history must be recorded.”