Ladies and gentlemen, all protocols observed.
I am Hannah Yambasu, one of the passionate players in ensuring that women and girls are safe from sexual and gender-based violence and related actions that make life degrading and creepy for them and to help ensure women and girls’ access to opportunities of growth and transformations. Transformations like those of Mariama Bah, Malala Yousafzai and yours truly, Hannah Yambasu and many more even when circumstances and bad factors stood on the way but the inner strength of the said women made them not to give up but to painstakingly progress towards changing their stories as it has been since.
Today, I am here and we are here to not only talk on Mariama Bah’s biographical memoir but to also learn more from her and get more motivated by her work titled FREE and WHOLE: My Journey towards Education and Freedom as a Fullani and Muslim Girl.
This work resonates with and justifies the actions and restlessness of us the players in making sure that life is safe, secured and progressive for women and girls in communities across.
Mariama Bah tells us in her biography the potholes, curves and slippery-hills she walked through on her journey towards education and freedom. Mariama’s journey of self-transformation started from her grandmother’s hut in Wanssan village, Guinea and continued in Spurloop Wilberforce, Freetown and finally to the United States where she acclaimed a lot more including this biographical memoir. Her most painful experience being the mutilation of her genital especially when that very ugly act was done on her twice in few days as the traditional women came back few days after they had cut her, saying that the cutting was incompletely done. Those traditionalists came to re-cut Mariama’s genital, leaving her bleeding in warm salted water all alone for hours before any relative or traditionalist could come back only when she had subbed almost to death. She had to survive that ugly experience first by the grace of God and then by her inner strength of courage. We must note strongly that Mariama Bah was and is a gallant woman of inner strength, determination and vision.
Ladies and gentlemen, Madam Mariama Bah’s story connotes or resonates with my own story and with our founded NGO called WAVES- i.e. Women Against Violence and Exploitations in Society. As this book is a product of Mariama’s painful experiences and strong desire for transformation, so also WAVES is the product of Hannah Yambasu’s painful experiences and strong desire for transformation in addition to the undying desire to transform our communities in the ways that women and girls can live safely, secured and progressively. Yours truly, Hannah Yambasu at tender age got sexually violated on separate occasions by people my mother trusted. My mother also attempted severally to send me into early marriage contrary to my dreams and aspirations of life. Just as Mariama Bah fought her way out from early and family marriage, so also I forced my way out from early marriage and child neglect I had been experiencing in my very mother’s hands. Mariama was stubborn to keep herself in school against her father’s wish of getting married to an illiterate cousin, just as how I also was stubborn to pursue an education against my mother’s wish of me getting married for her own selfish gains. No wonder it is this incumbent on Mariama, Hannah and many others of similar experiences to ensure that vulnerable women and children do not go through same. We also are appreciative of those men and women who never experienced our ugly experiences, but they are so strongly committed to making sure that women and children are safe, secured and progressive in their communities across.
As I conclude my statement, I wish to appreaciate Mariama Bah for her determination to sail through the crucibles of a traditionally entrenched society that never favored women’s education and empowerment and even more so her courage and strength to share her experiences as recorded in this novel. Let me use this opportunity to entreat the women who are going through similar or same experience to learn from Mariama’s story and me to remain courageous to achieving their vision, dreams and potentials. Let us engage and inspire our girls to imbibe in them the attitude of inner strength, determination and vision.
Thank you!
