Smashed the villages. Knocked their walls to bits.
Broke the kilns and meeting houses. Sometimes

you make me wonder. You, who now commits
“crime de guerre,” wouldn’t dream of such crimes
near your beloved Paris. If I’m devout
and dire it is only in proportion
to the horrors your soldiers carried out
during your Voulet-Chanoine mission.

You called me witch-queen. No, I’m a mother

who took up arms against the men who raped
her last daughter, then sold her last sister
to the pimps of France. There are monster-shaped
men who’ll fear the witch-queen of the Azna.

I will teach you my name: Sarraouna.

* * *

What is known about Sarraouna is that she was a queen of the Azna people, who ruled in a region of West Africa during the late 19th century. Like many controversies surrounding European colonialism there appears two conflicting versions of Sarraouna. In one she is a champion of her people, standing up against an invading army that used large-scale rape and massacres as a means of subduing an indigenous population. In the other she is a “witch-queen” who stirred up anti-French sentiment during a time when France was attempting to conquer Chad and unify all French territories in West Africa.

The Azna occupied the Dallol Mawri, a broad valley in the Hausa country of the present-day Dogondoutchi district of Niger in northwest Africa. Like so many heroes of history, myths have grown about Sarraouna’s childhood. She had a Spartan upbringing with adoptive parents. At the age of eighteen she already knew how to lead men into battle, and as a tribal sorceress, she held her warriors and her enemies alike in thrall. When the Fulani of Sokoto attempted to convert her and her people to Islam, she and her warriors fought bravely to drive them back …

In January 1899, French troops — primarily [African] mercenaries — commanded by captains Voulet and Chanoine left Segou in Mali, crossed the territories of the Zarma and of the Gourma, and entered the dense vegetation of the Dallol Mawri. On April 17, 1899, they laid siege with cannon fire to the village of Lugu, which Queen Sarraouna and her fierce warriors defended valiantly, determined not to allow the invaders drive her out: “We won’t move a single inch from here … even if we must die to the last person!” But the superior French arms proved too powerful … forced to retreat … she continued to harass her enemies, so intimidating the mercenaries that many of them abandoned the French. While the French captains, watching her rituals from afar, at first dismissed them as “drunkenness” and “incoherent ramblings of a superstitious woman,” the mercenaries came to believe her to be the Nkomo Woman, the femme fetale, the Dogoua, or demon-woman. (Jackson-Laufer, 354)

Work Cited

Jackson-Laufer, Guida. Women Rulers Throughout the Ages: An Illustrated Guide (Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO: 1999)

from the 1986 by Med Hondo, “Sarraouna”