Oliva Ouedraogo displays a piece of cloth that appears to be blood-stained under a spotlight in a completely black room.
Her voice drowns out the loud hum of a generator as she exclaims, “Long live the girl!” This is an unfortunate need as power outages have left Mali’s Bamako metropolis in complete darkness.
On October 15, Ouedraogo’s play “Queen,” also known in French as “Reine,” debuted at the Acte Sept cultural center.
It is about a girl who, after being raped by her stepfather on the night he marries her mother, speaks out against her family.
Burkina Faso native Ouedraogo claimed that she wrote the play to confront the taboo around sexual assault and rape in Africa.
“What inspired me to compose this? Even the victims acknowledge this. “No, you don’t have to agree to this, to be trampled underfoot,” she added.
She expresses her ire at the fact that the victims of this assault are viewed as “dirty” and “trash,” and that they feel compelled to keep quiet to prevent family strife.
Nearly half of Malian women between the ages of 15 and 49 had been victims of physical or sexual assault at some point in their life, according to official statistics.
Of those, 68% had never discussed the violence with anyone, according to a survey by the Malian National Institute of Statistics.
The Acte Sept Cultural Center’s director, Adama Traore, stated that he suggested holding the play because the silence surrounding rape is a huge problem.
“All this rape and incest, whether it’s in Europe, Africa, the West, everywhere – the United States. It causes scandals, but we don’t talk about it often,” he said.
“So, at some point we need to be able to confront the audience with these dark sides of ourselves.”
Mariama Samake, the director of the Malian NGO “Girl in Distress,” said the culture of silence that Ouedraogo campaigns against is widespread.
“I can say that there are girls who have been raped in every family,” she claimed. Because Mali is a patriarchal nation, these victims are compelled to remain silent.
The Cesana Theatre in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, will host another performance of “Queen” next month.
(Africanews)
