What happens when women of the Sahel sing? “If the singer can be a fierce critic of her society,” write Aissata Sidikou and Thomas Hale in Women’s Voices from West Africa: An Anthology of Songs from the Sahel, “she can also keep the social fabric together by contextualizing and historicizing events: announcing, answering, or accentuating concerns; and exploring the conditions of her people in her songs” (7). Indeed, as the book illustrates, women’s songs have for centuries depicted the Sahelian landscape and recounted the stories of empires and nations from a female point of view. Improvised by individual soloists as well as choruses representing collective communities of women, they are the constituents of a genre that deconstructs the trope of the “silent” African woman. While initially composed about and for women among women, they also address male compatriots who may have imagined that women, especially those in isolated settings, have no legitimate critique of their societies or any analysis of their “woman-being.” In this way the songs challenge patriarchal ideologies that impose limitations on female potential. Women’s verbal art also responds to and dismantles idyllic notions of “mother Africa on a pedestal” that were prevalent in early works of African literature produced by male authors. Texts in this collection reveal the power of a song as a liberation tool and as a sphere of therapeutic release that gives women the freedom to express themselves, in their own tongues, about all aspects of their lives in every arena in which they find themselves.

A distinguishing feature of this groundbreaking work, which features eighty songs collected by forty researchers, is that it by far exceeds what is normally expected from an anthology. This is due to the expertise of the editors, Aissatou Sidikou and Thomas Hale, who are both pioneers in an original terrain of inquiry. The introduction, titled “The Powerful Voices of Women in Song,” provides a sociological and cultural analysis that situates women’s verbal art as critical to an accurate reading of African history. The discovery of the genre dates back to manuscripts found in ancient Egypt and to eyewitness accounts recorded by the Berber explorer Ibn Battuta during the fourteenth century, documents that interrogate the notion of the voiceless African woman. The authors explore and present some of the explanations as to why scholars have not considered women’s songs as a valid literary form. One of the main reasons cited is the lack of scholars in African studies and women’s studies who actually know an African language.

Another stunning component of the book is the section titled “Peoples, Languages and Maps.” It is a concise atlas-survey of the ethnic groups and languages that inform women’s song and articulate some of the cultural, historical, and linguistic characteristics that can be used to identify the former empires, now nation-states, as a distinctive region. The Sahel is highlighted as a creative space where women express desert realities in a cappella narratives. At the same time, the song lyrics chronicle a female space and definitively express women’s universal struggle for full acceptance as equal human beings. The lyrics are cerebral and the words serve as proof that not only do women “think” and “sing-speak” about their condition, the cosmos and ethos of their existential context, but also that African women have always “thought” about, articulated, and responded to their social environments using their own cultural styles and their own languages as the vehicles of transmission.

The themes of the songs issue from a dynamic that transcends global boundaries. Marriage, in all its facets, is shown to be the most frequent subject of Sahelian women’s verbal art, followed by (2) children, (3) women in society, and (4) death. Some of the songs are serious, others poke fun, chastise, and critique. Universal in appeal, these songs “tell woman” and the essential messages found in the lyrics can be applied to women’s lives all over the world. All of the songs engage the listener/reader and provide new and fresh perspectives on what it means to be a woman on the African stage where the quest for survival unfolds. An essential characteristic of the work is that it enables readers and scholars who are not skilled in the original languages of the texts to have access to English translations that capture the energy of African orality “au féminin.” For those learned in one or more of the African languages featured in the volume, the original texts have been transcribed and placed in an appendix.

Women’s Voices from West Africa: An Anthology of Songs from the Sahel is a must for libraries, scholars, professors, and researchers. It is an interdisciplinary resource for all who are interested in authentic voices from Africa recorded in indigenous languages. It is also a valuable resource for the enrichment of general readers.