She was natural in a mud hut in an isolated hamlet in Africa with no electricity or running water, a 10-minute hike to the nearest road. Unschooled, she was married off to a remote cousin as a teenager Her education
"She is a village girl who didn't go to train to see English, Greek, Portuguese, what cause you," said her elder brother, 49, whose maiden key is Mamoudou. "All she learned was the Koran." Her personality
As a girl, she was shy, sheltered and elevated to respect authority.
"Before she left here, nobody even knew if she could talk up for herself," Mamoudou said. "She never got into any arguments, with anybody." Her invisibility
The woman melted into this community. She did not appear to be easily known even in the neighborhoods where Guineans often lived. Her new life
One day, the woman told Mr. Jabbie that she was going the restaurant for a better paycheck at the Sofitel hotel.
With that, she entered a new world, with a grand, golden canopy and wood-paneled suites, blocks from Times Square. She was considered a good employee there.
And we all know what happened next. Before her alleged violation by the then-chief of the IMF, the accuser was a mom, a maid, and a person. Now she's being depicted as a type - as a wide-eyed bumpkin in the big city, as a dutiful working-class woman, as an untutored immigrant from a mud hut. Some of these portrayals reveal enduring prejudices about Africa; there's more than a little of the noble savage in the "village girl" portrait the Times and Reuters paint. There's also a trend to set her up as a "perfect" rape victim: innocent, guileless, silent, incapable of "request for it" because she scarcely even has her own identity with which to ask. In a disturbing trade-off, the accuser appears to get more sympathetic even as she's erased as a human being.
Despite efforts by both American and European media outlets to dig into her secret life, we even don't know lots about DSK's accuser. The Times clearly didn't see much when it went looking, or else the paper probably wouldn't have included passages like this:
After prayers at a few West African mosques, Guineans often go to Guinean-owned restaurants to eat cooked cassava leaf and beef stew, drink homemade juice made from hibiscus flowers and watch television broadcasts of African news and sports. They shop at Guinean stores that sell West African staples like cornmeal, yams, palm oil and spices.
Absent real information, all the iron have are stereotypes some hardworking immigrant women and about people from darkest Africa. This could end up being right for the accuser's case - the more prosecutors can portray her as without any agency, the more trouble the defence will have supporting its contention that DSK had consensual sex with her. But it's sad that being stripped of personhood makes someone a more sympathetic rape victim, as though anything that makes her actually human also makes her at fault. And it's sad that once she enters the public eye, a woman can so easily get a study for preconceived notions.
From African Village To Middle Of Ordeal [NYT]
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