Maïmouna, Yémasõ, Benin, 1998

Maïmouna was the youngest daughter of my host mother, Tounkara, and the only daughter of four to attend school. As a general rule, girls did not attend school, especially the children of subsistence farmers. They helped out at home and in the fields. Almost everything was done manually, not by machine, from growing maize to drawing water, doing laundry, and trekking into the forest to gather wood for cooking. I say almost everything because there was a small flour mill that ran on gas. There was a television too, and a VCR hooked up to a generator. A man who made decent money growing cotton had bought them and showed Rambo and Kung Fu movies to boys and men who paid 50CFA (10 cents). Girls and women couldn’t go to films. It wasn’t considered proper. Girls and women fetched water, chopped wood, lit and fanned fires, stirred yams in a pot, scrubbed the pots, scrubbed pagnes, bombas, t-shirts, and bras in a basin, hung them on a line, minded the children, pushed seeds into the ground with their heels, picked cotton. Maïmouna did all these tasks and somehow managed to attend school, though she often had to miss.

At the time I took this photograph she was in CM2, a grade she’d repeated three times. On the same day she asked me if she could pose beside my bicycle. Riding a bicycle was another thing girls and women were not allowed to do. Only boys and men could ride bikes. As a foreigner, someone who would never fit in, I was exempt from this rule. I had a Peace Corps-issue Trek so I could ride the 30 kilometers to the county seat where I bought kerosene for my lamp and candles. Those rides gave me space to think and dream and confirmation that I could get out, if I wanted to.

What is like to be confined to one’s village? What is it like have only your own two feet as a mode of transport? Your feet will get you places, eventually, but not as fast as those who can get there by bike. I couldn’t help but think of what suffragist Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) said of bicycling: “It has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world…I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” Sometimes the objects one asks to be photographed with are aspirational, a wish for the future. I took a picture of Maïmouna beside my bike and gave her the photograph because I could not give her the desired object. It wasn’t mine to give, but I had wishes for her.