Service to her country through education was not Mariama Ba’s sole vocation, however. From a Muslim Lebou family from Dakar, she also threw herself into the women’s movement to fight for greater recognition of women’s issues. Throughout her life, she tried to reconcile her grounding in her culture, her Muslim faith, and her openness to other cultural horizons. As such, rootedness and openness constituted the two sometimes conflicting poles along her exacting journey. Towards the end of her life, her literary genius achieved full expression in So long a letter, a novel which directly confronted polygamy and the caste-system in Senegal – a predominantly Muslim country, firmly attached to its traditions, yet traversed by profound transformations, and confronted by the challenge of new models of society.