Once I saw a film made by an NGO about education for girls in Sierra Leone. A woman, blonde, with an American accent interviews a young girl. The girl is maybe nine years old, perhaps she is as much twelve, it is hard to tell, so tiny and quiet is she. She comes from Makeni, which is a town near my ancestral village. The girl’s story is this: Her mother is a woman without a husband and sells ‘cookery’ in the marketplace. She needs the girl to help her. Thus the girl is unable to go to school but a kindly neighbour, a teacher, volunteers to help the girl learn to read and write. This interview is to see if the girl might be a child the NGO should help. Now the interviewer is asking her about the books she likes to read and invites her to share the story of her favourite. A woman writes a letter, says the girl. The interviewer struggles to understand, the girl’s voice is so small. Princess? says the woman. About a princess? Perhaps it is the child’s accent she fails to understand. The girl persists. She writes a letter to her friend in America. About what happens in her life. The interviewer thinks she knows the sorts of stories girls like the one in front of her read. She wants the appearance of understanding. She needs it, after all it is her job to help girls like this. So you like princesses? she says with a note of finality. Because that's what girls like, right? But the child is not talking about a princess. She is describing the novel, So Long a Letter, written by the Senegalese writer Mariama Ba. I know, because I am currently teaching the same book to my undergraduate class at Georgetown University. It is considered a modern classic and tells the story of a woman caught between the Islamic values she holds, and the modern ones to which she aspires. Ba drew much of her inspiration from her own experience as a young girl educated at a Senegalese École Normale in the 1940’s. The child knows more than the woman. The woman does not know this. Perhaps she never will.

Aminatta Forna