NAKED woman, black woman, clothed with your color which is life, with your form which is beauty . . ./ Your solemn contralto voice is the spiritual song of the beloved." So wrote Senegal's Poet-President Leopold Senghor. A beautiful Ghanaian playwright and teacher, Effua Sutherland, recently tried to describe another aspect of the African woman's traditional role. "She is a goddess because she founds society. Her breasts are more of a motherly symbol than a sexual one. She is the power behind man." Mrs. Sutherland carefully recited the words of English Explorer Mary Kingsley, who once wrote: "The old woman you may see crouching behind the chief, or whom you may not see at all but who is with him all the same, is saying, 'Do not listen to the white men, it is bad for you.' " Added Mrs. Sutherland: "That is our secret. We are divine."
Against the mythical concept of the African woman as a spiritual force is the harsh truth that millions of women in Black Africa still endure purely tribal lives of childbearing, drudgery and subjugation. From Dakar to Dar es Salaam, they can be seen, like beasts of burden, carrying enormous loads of food and firewood on their shoulders and heads. But it is also true that in the decade of social upheaval that has come with political independence, African women have begun to leave the villages and the townships to step quite suddenly, with hardly a flicker of their ebon eyes, into the modern world.
Kenya's Eliza. In a massive rejection of traditional roles and values that might be called the African counterpart of the Women's Liberation movement, hundreds of thousands of African girls have left their villages to go to school, and have never returned. In the Ivory Coast, seven times as many women as men are moving to the cities. Some join the growing student population; 40% of Kenya's secondary school pupils and 10% of its students overseas today are women. Others manage to find jobs as shopgirls, typists and clerks. In Monrovia, Liberia, women drive cabs. In the Congo they serve as paratroopers, and in Nigeria as police officers.
At the time of independence, crash courses were held in many African capitals to teach the wives of government officials the niceties of Western manners. The handsome Ngina Kenyatta, fourth wife of Kenya's President Jomo Kenyatta, 79, is an African answer to Eliza Doolittle. She is said to have spent a year being coached by British instructors in deportment, table manners, fashion, ballroom dancing and public speaking before emerging as "Mama
Ngina," the poised and gracious First Lady.