If a ten-year-old Samia Suluhu Hassan had told anyone, even a 25-year-old, in 1970 that she would like to be the president when she grows up, she would have been dismissed outright as indulging in childhood fantasy. No one would have paid attention, let alone take her seriously enough to explain the futility of her dream.
By then she was just an ordinary Zanzibari girl skipping and playing games with other children around the old Makunduchi town. In the same year (1970), she had joined middle primary school at Ziwani Primary School in Pemba, another of Tanzania’s islands.
Then, still, Tanzania had clocked just 10 years of independence and was under the firm leadership of its founding father, the legendary Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere. Many other African countries, including Kenya and Uganda, had got independence and were either under civilian or military rulers who were busy establishing themselves in perpetual power.
Needless to say that in those days, leadership in the independent Africa was not only a men’s province but virtually a strong-man’s forte. To hear a toothy ten-year-old girl coveting the highest seat on the land would have been an abomination deserving of the sternest rebuke. Of course, a few women were thrown in to accessorise the throne.
Well, that was so 1970s, and humble Samia Suluhu may not even have dared to nurse, let alone voice, such lofty ambition. But now, 50 years later, she has risen to the apex office in the second largest East African country. She became president last year following the sudden death of President John Pombe Magufuli, whom she had deputised as Vice-President since 2015.
Her smooth ascendancy to the top seat last year came as a big and pleasant surprise across the region. Being female, and given the late Magufuli’s strong arm grip of Tanzania’s political and economic affairs, many inside and outside the country expected some “mapinduzi” of sorts from misogynist elements in the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) corridors.
She has just clocked one year in office and a film featuring her dubbed “The Royal Tour” is lighting up the screens in the United States of America this month.
When she took over office as President of the United Republic of Tanzania, East Africans went bonkers celebrating her achievement as a major milestone in the region. Everyone seems to want a piece of her.
Mama Samia’s feat in Tanzania
There are only six women that have headed governments in post-colonial, even if fleetingly in a time of genocide such as Rwanda’s Agathe Uwilingiyamana in 1994.
There is a way in which Mama Samia’s feat in Tanzania excites some literary taste buds. Her political achievement is viewed as a boost to the African women fighting in the trenches for the emancipation from cultural and political impediments.
Is President Samia Suluhu She who would be king? Her rise to power in the united territory seemed to conjure up a “prophesy” by Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo that women will eventually get their rightful share of the political space in Africa.
Aidoo, a prominent writer, made the prophesy in her futuristic short story, “She Who Would Be King” published in her 1997 collection The Girl Who Can and Other Stories. It begins with an encounter between ten-year-old girl, Adjoa Modji, and a 25-year-old would be manufacturer and businessman.
When she told him that she wished to be the president of her country when she grows up, the businessman saw no presidential prospect in the plucky girl's ambition but sheer madness.
“W-H-A-T-?-!-! …You are mad,” he told her matter-of-factly.
They were in the kitchen of a university lecturer. It is clear that the girl had set her young eyes on the top seat in her country, probably Ghana, and a conviction to achieve it was cooking in her mind. She turned on the heat: “Why not?”
The man stewed with frustration, “Anyway, you can never be the President of this country.”
Stories that inspire women
Another hot “Why not?” from the girl and the man boils over, firing the phallocentric weapon of last resort: “Listen. I don’t think the men of this country will ever let a woman be their President.”
“No? We shall see,” the girl serves up her notice to the man who represents all the men that are the stumbling blocks to the women’s leadership progress.
Fifty years after this encounter, Prof. Adjoa Modji’ sees her dream come true through her 36-year-old daughter Afi-Yaa. The girl is elected President of the Confederation of African States, quite to the chagrin of the men including the manufacturer and business man who is now 74. He fears that with her election, women will rule them for very long.
Such are the literary stories that inspire women to pursue their dreams for higher social, economic and political achievements.
In a journal article, “Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Girl Who Can and Other Stories: Creating Political Space for Women in Social and National Domains,” Monique Oshame Ekpong observes that faced with male arrogance and other socio-cultural constructs, feminist writers, like Adoo, strive to create political space for women in nation-building in fiction so that other women can emulate such successful female characters in everyday life.
As Aidoo demonstrates in her stories, it might be a matter of time more female heads of government flower in the continent. Meanwhile Mama Samia will soon be spreading her charm to head the East African Corporation (EAC) that now includes DRC and stretches from the mouth of River Tana in the Indian Ocean to the mouth of River Congo in the Atlantic Ocean. The African Union (AU) here she come too.
