THE RAPE OF FATIMAH: A TRAGEDY IN GENDER POLITICS

Set in 1950s Kissy Mess-Mess village in Sierra Lionne, Nabie Swaray’s tragedy, The Rape of Fatimah (1976), demonstrates Africa’s diverse ideologies, tribal traditions, religious multiplicity and mythical, indigenous culture that marginalize women in a dominant patriarchal community. Fifteen year old Fatimah’s rape, by her step-father and uncle, as a sacrifice to attain chief- power, traumatically scars her physically and psychologically, depersonalizing her, robbing her of ‘voice’ and being. Diagnosed as bewitched, she is forced to participate in communal ceremonial practices of ritualism, mourning, witchcraft and marriage, to reaffirm her ascribed feminine role as a virgin bride, but fails and dies. 
Nene, woman avenger and guardian, is sister of Makalay, ( Chief ‘s wife whom he murdered  with their daughter ,to protect himself), breaks free from the ‘male order’  by challenging “the categorization of womanhood”, asserting to her rapist husband that she is “not a woman”. Her conjuring of ancestral spirits, her worship ritual, sacrificial ceremony and libations poured at Makalay’s grave, reassert her position and authority over patriarchy and the empirical world, through the supernatural. Similarly Makalay is powerfully repositioned as a ‘voiced’ ghost haunting Chief, driving him to insanity and death. Finally Fatimah gains supernatural power as a dead body in a coffin, knocking down her rapist uncle to his death. Calamity befalls the whole community when Chief murders his women clan. No longer marginalized, Swaray’s heroines are empowered through death and the supernatural, in a world where patriarchy cannot function.
Swaray unearths African traditions, cult, customs, beliefs, legends and folklore as part of its generic character that allegorically marginalizes Africa from the rest of the world. “The dark continent” remains, like its women, shrouded in darkness, primitivism, and superstition as the dull tabule and the wailing women strike the end note of the tragedy of Fatimah and of Africa.