THIAROYE-SUR-MER, Senegal — Sometimes when she is alone and
looking at the sea, Yayi Bayam Diouf imagines the silhouette of her son passing
over the waters offshore.
اضافة اعلان
Not usually the sentimental type, she softens when asked about
the personal tragedy that would spur her to challenge her town’s traditional
patriarchy and become a path breaker for female empowerment.
“C’est la vie,” Diouf, 62, said softly, of the tragedy — “that’s
life.”
It happened in the spring of 2006, when her son, Alioune, a
26-year-old fisherman, went on a yearly trip to the normally rich fishing
grounds off Mauritania with others from their town of Thiaroye-sur-Mer, an
impoverished suburb of the Senegalese capital, Dakar. But the catch was lean,
and they were reluctant to return home with little to show for their efforts.
Instead, he and about 80 others crowded onto his fishing boat
and headed to the Canary Islands on a route called “Barsa wala Barsakh,” or “Barcelona
or die” in the local language, Wolof. They vanished along the way, and their
bodies were never found.
“I wish I had at least seen his body,” Diouf said. “Sometimes I
wonder if he really died. One day, I was out in the sea fishing, and I really
thought I saw him pass by. It hurts a lot. It’s very hard to talk about him.”
That set her on a course that has led to a plethora of awards
for community activism; a photo in her house shows her receiving a medal from
Senegal’s president, Macky Sall. She has encouraged dozens of women to set up
not just fishing operations but also hair and clothing shops as well as
businesses making soap and makeup, all supported with microfinancing from
government and nonprofit sources. In 2015, she used a grant from United Nations
(U.N.) Women Senegal to build a farm to grow mussels, providing work for about
100 women.
But all that came later. Diouf said that after Alioune’s death,
she felt drawn to the sea and began thinking of leaving her office job to fish.
Yet she faced resistance in the form of a patriarchal culture that expected
women to stay in the home and men to work outside.
When she approached a group of community leaders one night after
evening prayers seeking permission to fish, she was told that “the water doesn’t
need women.” Moreover, they said, one of the traditions among the Lebu ethnic
group common in the area was that women could not touch the fish if they were
menstruating.
“I told them, ‘That’s fine — I already went through menopause,’”
said Diouf, who is herself Lebu. “I am now feeling so self-confident, and I
want to transmit that to other women.”
Diouf had one other card to play. For years, thousands of men
had left Thiaroye-sur-Mer in pursuit of better lives abroad or died trying —
374 fatalities from 2003 to 2019, a local group estimates. There simply were
not enough men left, she said, warning that the town’s economic survival
depended on incorporating women into the workforce. At length, they relented.
“I had to win them over,” she said. “It takes strength of
character and commitment to do this.”
Her first name, Yayi, means “mother” in Wolof, and she thinks it
is fitting because she was not satisfied with just winning the right to fish
for herself. She was determined to extend the right to work to every woman.
But first she had to get started fishing. She procured a license
— the first woman ever to get one — then borrowed a little over $100, enough to
rent a boat and pay for the gasoline. The fishing part came naturally, she
said. “I was born by the water,” she said. “I swim better than a fish.”
Diouf said she was also driven by a sense of the injustice women
faced in traditional Senegalese society.
“I grew up watching my mother carry 30 or 40 kilos of fish,” she
said, a backbreaking 29 to 41 pounds. “It always hurt me that women’s labor
wasn’t recognized. For years, I saw women working hard processing the fish
caught by their sons or husbands, selling it at the market, and they didn’t
profit from it.”
To remedy that, Diouf established a center to train women to
fish, to handle their catch in better sanitary conditions and to treat fish
stocks as an important resource rather than something to be plundered.
Around the same time, she also created the Women’s Collective
for the Fight Against Illegal Immigration to persuade young men to resist the
dangerous temptation to take to the high seas and instead make a life at home.
Not surprisingly, she is constantly on the move. When she is not
busy at the training center, she is pushing women to start small enterprises,
finding funds for microcredits or wrestling with government officials to
bolster the struggling economy of Thiaroye-sur-Mer.
On a Wednesday morning in January, a few women set up a small
table in front of the training center to sell fish, juice and breakfast items
to the arriving students and the fishermen and women when they return from the
sea, one of many such microbusinesses she has encouraged.
That morning, Diouf did not have much time for pleasantries or
small talk. Hastily grabbing a plate from the women, she rushed into the
training center, which stands across the bay from the island of Gorée, a point
of departure for millions of Africans after they were sold into slavery.
Inside, the walls of Diouf’s office are decorated with photos of
her in a pirogue and wearing an orange life jacket. She was scheduled to meet
that day with a Fishing Ministry representative to complete the paperwork for a
donation of equipment to improve sanitary measures in fish processing.
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