Aoua Kéita

Abstract

Aoua Kéita’s autobiography Femme d’Afrique: La vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-même expands the scholarship on African women’s feminist networks to include collective resistance and community formation by women in rural areas. Reading Kéita’s autobiography alongside works by Ousmane Sembène highlights rural women’s roles at the forefront of anticolonial struggle in West Africa and their strategies of resistance that hinged primarily on transgressive mobility. Through marches, protests and occupying space, women in rural communities worked to reverse colonial dispossession of land and the erasure of their contributions to public life.