Mariama Sonko married at the age of 17. Under pressure from her family, she moved to Niaguis, her husband's village. A small farming village in the Casamance region of southern Senegal. There, she began working with vegetables and became involved in a women's farming association. She noted with anger that tradition prevented women from owning land, and that they could only aspire to rent it under abusive conditions. Laws could now say whatever they wanted: the weight of custom turned her and her comrades' supposed egalitarian zeal into a dead letter.
That was some twenty years ago. This episode of injustice particularly irritated the young Sonko. With a group of women farmers, she had leased a few hectares of land from a marabout, an Islamic religious leader. After years of hard work - clearing, weeding, ploughing and sowing from sunup to sundown - the marabout announced that he wished to terminate the lease. It was no coincidence that the man made his decision just as the land was beginning to produce good harvests. "I was outraged. I told him he couldn't throw us out just when our efforts were starting to bear fruit," says Sonko in a park in Turin (Italy), where she went at the end of September 2024 to take part in Terra Madre, the fair organized by the movement Slow Food.
Sonko paid dearly for his defiance of the religious leader. "A scandal broke out. The village elders accused me of pitting men and women against each other. I replied that what had been done to us was morally wrong. But it didn't do much good," she asserts. She became an outcast in Niaguis. She was forbidden to continue participating in the community movement and was stripped of a position she held on the town council. "They tried to silence me, but they couldn't," she says proudly, with her firm pose, laconic gestures and booming voice.
Sonko, now 52, says that whenever they tried to humiliate her, she always stood up instead of being intimidated. This happened when she was a child visiting her mother's family in Dakar. Some children harassed her because she was a Jola, the majority ethnic group in Casamance, others called her a "hungry bitch". "In the capital, some people consider us savages. I've always been physically strong. I used to stand up to them and, if I had to, I'd hit them to make them understand that it was the last time they'd say that to me", she explains. In Africa, agroecology is nothing other than a form of food sovereignty traditionally managed by women.

At the time of the incident with the maraboutSonko had already made a name for herself in the region, notably as head of the federation of women's organizations in Ziguinchor, one of the three provinces of Casamance. "It was from there that I continued my fight, raising awareness and training fellow women. On the radio and in forums. In private conversations and in peasant women's circles. At every opportunity, Sonko got her message across: land for those who work it.