Burkinabe playwright aims to break the silence about rape

Under a spotlight in a pitch dark room, Oliva Ouedraogo holds up a piece of fabric that looks like its stained with blood.

She cries “Long live the girl!”, her voice drowning out the loud hum of a generator, an unfortunate necessity as the city of Bamako in Mali lies in darkness due to power cuts.

Ouedraogo’s play “Queen” (known by its French name “Reine”) showed at the Acte Sept cultural centre on 15 October.

It tells the story of a girl who defies her family and speaks out after being raped by her stepfather on the night he marries her mother.

Ouedraogo, who comes from Burkina Faso, said she wrote the play to address the culture of silence about rape and sexual assault in Africa.

“What pushed me to write this? It’s that even the victims accept this. I’m saying no, you don’t have to accept, to submit to this, to be trampled on,” she said.

She says she’s angry that it is the victims of this violence who are is considered “dirty” and “trash”, and that they feel obliged to stay quiet in order to avoid family conflict.

According to official figures, almost half of Malian women aged between 15 and 49 have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lives.

The report by the Malian National Institute of Statistics noted that of those, 68 per cent  had never spoken about the violence to anyone.

Adama Traore, director of the Acte Sept cultural centre, said he proposed hosting 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 in every family, we have girls that have been victims of rape,” she said.  “Mali is a patriarchal society, so these victims are forced to keep quiet, to not speak.”

“Queen” will be performed again next month at the Cesana Theatre in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.