“How can Eve in the bible be born from a man when biologically a man is born from woman?” Tracing feminist struggles in the colonial period and 1980s Yewwu-Yewwi feminist movement in Senegal

Abstract

abstract At the beginning of the 20th century in Casamance, southern Senegal, a young woman with healing powers named Alandisso Bassene opened a shrine, and would quickly amass a following of both men and women. A clash with missionaries and French colonial administration would result in ‘the most acclaimed witch doctor’ being imprisoned for the next 15 years in 1919. Six decades later, in 1984, a new radical feminist movement in Senegal, Yewwu-Yewwi for Women’s Liberation, emerged and challenged the hierarchical relationship between men and women, denouncing patriarchy, with a brand of feminism that echoed global feminism. In an interview with the state newspaper Le Soleil in 1986, Marie Angélique Savane, the leader of Yewwu-Yewwi, described feminism as the awareness of inequality of the sexes and denouncing injustice against women despite them ‘carrying humanity’ and being a dynamic and progressive force (Fall 1986a). This article studies the historical narratives of mediumship, priestesses, shrines and their followers in southern Senegal during the colonial period, where power circulates, and the feminist thought of Yewwu-Yewwi, where the lack of power held by women is addressed in the language of equality and rights.