By Dan Moshenberg

Did you hear about Medea? You know, the woman who killed her two kids? It turns out, according to the Associated Press, she lives in Mali, and her name is Coumba, or maybe Tabita. At any rate, she’s 18, a domestic worker in Bamako, and she did the unthinkable. She killed her child.

Why? Why does a woman do “the unthinkable”? There’s the question. According to the AP, it’s because women in Mali are trapped. A poor country where abortion is illegal, where contraception use is rare, women are forced first into abusive, low paying jobs, and in particular domestic work, and then suffer rape and pregnancy. They must then rely on the kindness of strangers to help them pull through. The result? For women in prison, the top three crimes are theft, assault, infanticide.

Mali is indeed a hard place. It suffers crushing poverty, is surrounded by weak and poor countries, is landlocked, and, perhaps most significantly, is on the verge of a population tsunami. Mali has one of the highest rates of annual population growth in the world. The capital, Bamako, may be the fastest growing city and, not surprisingly, is becoming one of the most expensive. This means the gap between haves and have-nots is also increasingly, quickly and massively. As if that weren’t enough, Mali is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to climate change. According to a recent report, Mali is hotspot for food insecurity due to climate change.

A dismal picture. And an incomplete one.

Mali is also considered a stable democracy, even a model moderate Muslim democracy. It’s current Prime Minister is a woman, Cissé Mariam Kaïdama Sidibé. New elections are expected next year. The leading candidate, at least at present, is Dioncounda Traoré, who supported the recent Family Code legislation, which supported equal rights, or more equal rights, between women and men.

In fact, women are quite prominent all over Mali. Women choreographers like Kettly Noel, Haitian-born and Bamako-based, compose and perform dances that engage women’s issues, in Mali and across the continent. Militant women artists like Oumou Sangaré sing protest songs against polygamy as they organize concerts that are women’s, and feminist, festivals.  Defiant women singers such as Khaira Arby challenge their families and home communities as they challenge the world to keep up and to keep dancing. Fiercely feminist women writers such as Oumou Ahmar Cissé write, and argue, for the rights and autonomous spaces of women and girls. Malian women are prominently engaged in political structures, in State structures, in anti-poverty and other social movements, and in women’s leadership development among younger women and girls.

This is not to say that Mali is perfect or easy. Its homophobic laws, and violence, made the news globally earlier this year and last year. Women struggle daily, and over the long haul, with all sorts of exclusion … and worse. Rather, it is to say that Coumba and Tabita, two young women, are part of a complex local, national, and regional narrative and fabric. They are not simply victims, they are not simply objects of pity, they are not simply vessels of pathos. They are not the African reiteration of a Greek myth or drama. They are, instead, two young Malian women who await and deserve a better report.