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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Female authority and faith: Catholic sisters in Burkina Faso
| Panel |
48. Women, Men, and Faith: Reconfigurations of Authority
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| Paper ID | 212 |
| Author(s) |
Langewiesche, Katrin
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | This paper analyses how catholic african sisters have contributed to the change of relationships between men and women, youth and elders in Burkina Faso. African catholic sisters contribute to the promotion of women, they allow some women to accede to religious authority and power and impose on the other side a very strictly management of female body. The catholic sisters are presented in this paper as active women in a history which can not be reduced to domination and relegation of their gender, even if those situations were been and still are a reality that nobody want to deny, in catholic or other religious context.
Contemporary case studies reveal that until today the escape from forced marriage is one major motivation of young women to enter momentarily or durably into the sister’s house. A minority of the girls persists in their engagement and becomes sisters. Those who persist are engaged for a chastely life and renounce to maternity. In spite of these obligations, entirely new for the local society, the first vocations take place already in 1930 when seven mossi girls become the first Black Sisters of the new congregation Sœurs Noires de l’Immaculée Conception. Nowadays a lot of women are still attracted by this way.
Interviews with sisters and the analysis of archives allowed to state that these women consider the religious engagement like an alternative to the life traced for a women by tradition. To become a religious sister is an individual choice in opposition to the life imposed by the society to the most women. For some women it is an efficient possibility to oppose themselves to their parents will (notably in regard to the choice of a husband) or to refuse a classical female trajectory. Chastity and the refusal of maternity, constraints imposed by Catholicism to the female body, become in this case a possibility to accede to a life out of social norms which allows some women to realise their individual aspirations.
Some sisters have an exceptional authority for women in the burkinabe society. They decide of the destiny of their co-sisters whether older or younger than themselves and they can control the work and life of secular women. Inside the congregation the sisters have qualified professions and work autonomously without men. The active sisters are one of the most educated group of women in the local society. They occupy more qualified professions than the most burkinabe women. Field research conducted in 2006 reveals that the image of the obedient sister “out of another time” living at the expense of their congregation is very far away from the imagination of contemporary young girls. On the contrary, it is the professional engagement of the sisters in the modern world that is attractive for the young women. Protected by their vocation, these women can exercise power and, under certain circumstances accede to public affairs.
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