Dakar Divorcees Wear Single Status With Pride

DAKAR, Senegal -- She's the queen of her neighborhood, a Dakar diva with press-on purple toenails, a dizzying array of orange and purple outfits with matching hair weaves and, in her boldest statement, a divorce.

Khadija Sall, 34, kicked her cheating husband out of the house last year, moved to one of the liveliest neighborhoods in the city, bought a one-room hair salon, painted it pink and then painted the town red.

"I'm no fool," said Sall, tugging a weave into a customer's head with one hand and dousing herself with perfume with the other. "My husband didn't believe in me. He was staying with this one and that. So I packed, and I left him with no one to clean and wash."

In beauty salons, banks and markets in this city of more than 2 million, many women say they won't stay with cheating and abusive men when they can make their own money and take care of themselves.

The mass migration of Africans from family farms to urban areas is creating a generation of women who are more cosmopolitan, more independent and even more willing to divorce as they settle into city life. While women in rural areas tend to be economically beholden to their husbands and tied to tradition, those who move to the city can find jobs, apartments and ultimately acceptance.

"Our grandmothers never got divorced. They were miserable till the grave," said Fotou Ndpye, 34, who was waiting on a purple velvet love seat in Sall's salon. Ndpye is single and works as a government secretary. "My grandmother was never paid for housekeeping and raising children. But I am paid for my work, and I want to enjoy that income. . . . That is the beauty of life in Dakar. There is no paycheck in the bush."

In some African cities, the divorce rate has doubled in the past decade, according to the Uganda Association of Women Lawyers, which focuses on women's rights and has several branches on the continent. The increase is due in part to new divorce laws, according to the organization. In Uganda, for example, a constitutional court ruled in 2004 that women could divorce their husbands in cases of infidelity and domestic violence.

In Senegal, women have had the right to divorce since colonial times but rarely did so, according to the country's Ministry of Culture. But in recent years, officials say, the rate has increased as more people moved to the city, where formal courts were ready to handle the process.

Last year, Sall started a group called Dakar's Divorcees because so many of her female friends were newly single. They discuss problems that divorced women everywhere face, including dating and delinquent child-support payments.

They also talk about problems more related to living in Africa, such as being shunned by village elders when they go home on visits and being forced to repay dowries to their ex-husbands, who in some African countries pay a woman's family to wed her.

"Divorce in Africa is not for the meek," said Abdoulaye Throub, 29, whose wife divorced him because they argued so much over money after they moved to Dakar. "The city laws have made it easier for women to leave. Marriage used to be forever in Africa, and now, like everywhere else, it's 'Till divorce do we part,' " he said.

One afternoon, Sall coated her fake eyelashes in bright blue mascara, changed her high heels three times and stepped out into her neighborhood.

"My estranged husband, he can suffer without my beauty," she bragged to a male admirer. She stopped on the street to greet chicken sellers, tried on several pairs of sunglasses and then riffled through mounds of bras and underwear at an outdoor store.

"To be a woman without a hovering husband is nice," said Sall, who has three children.

She chatted with women in the market about how "only women can really handle the city life; they are used to hard work, raising children. . . . "

She laughed about an episode of "Desperate Housewives" she had heard about and the French magazine articles about frantic women trying to catch a man.

"We in Africa are trying to leave our men, not marry them," she said with a laugh as she marched through the market, money in hand, blue eye shadow on her mind.