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“When you are a woman in the cinema, men want to sleep with you to dominate and control you. If you refuse, it becomes violent. » This observation, Kady Traoré draws it up after twenty years of career. Known in Africa for her roles in popular films and series (Hunt in Ouaga, super cops), the forty-year-old, also a director, breaks the silence.
For the first time, this familiar face on Burkinabe and Ivorian screens publicly says that he was the victim of two attempted rapes in the exercise of his profession. “I suffered from being silent for so long to preserve my image. I speak to regain my pride”, she announces.
Kady Traoré evokes a first attack, in 2017, during the International Festival of Carthage, in Tunisia, committed by an Ivorian journalist. “My group and I had dinner with him. In the evening, he knocked on the door of my hotel room. I let him in and then he threw me on the bed. I struggled and he ran away. »
Two years later, she claims to have suffered a new rape attempt. The author would be a famous director who had made advances to him in the past. “We met at a festival abroad to present the film on which I had worked. One evening, when he was giving a party, he jumped on me in a corner of the house. I defended myself by biting him. He tore my dress and my underwear. » Kady Traoré did not file a complaint, for fear, she says, that ” that [sa] word is not accepted by the police”.
“Predation on actresses”
While, in the United States and in certain European countries, the #metoo movement has paved the way for denunciations of male violence in the cinema, and former producer Harvey Weinstein was again found guilty, Monday, December 19, of sexual assault, in French-speaking Africa, these voices remain inaudible.
However, the testimonies collected from filmmakers, actresses, technicians, producers, from Senegal to Cameroon via Benin, describe a massive phenomenon. From everyday sexism to rape, these brutal acts shatter the health and careers of those who experience them.
This is the case of Azata Soro, whose face was lacerated by filmmaker Tahirou Tasséré Ouédraogo, whom she also accuses of sexual assault – he was sentenced in November 2017 to an eighteen-month suspended prison sentence for “intentional assault” and the payment of health costs. Forced into exile in France for her safety and care, she tried, in 2019, to unite women in French-speaking cinema around #memepaspeur to encourage them to denounce their executioners. Led with the support of several actresses such as Aïssa Maïga or Nadège Beausson-Diagne, who herself admitted having been attacked by two African filmmakers in her career, the campaign did not however give rise to a surge.
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