BY THOMAS SANKARA  
If society sees the birth of a boy as a “gift from God,” the birth of a girl is greeted as an act of fate, or at best, an offering that can serve in the production of food and the perpetuation of the human race.

The little male will be taught how to want and get, to demand and be served, to desire and take, to decide things without being questioned. The future woman, however, is dealt blow after blow by a society that unanimously, as one man—and “as one man” is the appropriate term—drums into her head norms that lead nowhere. A psychological straitjacket called virtue produces a spirit of personal alienation within her. A preoccupation with being protected is nurtured in the child’s mind, inclining her to seek the supervision of a guardian or drawing her into marriage. What a monstrous mental fraud! This child knows no childhood. From the age of three, she must be true to her role in life: to serve and be useful.

While her brother of four or five will play till he drops from exhaustion or boredom, she, with little ceremony, will enter into production. She already has a trade: assistant housewife. It is an occupation without pay since, as is generally said, a housewife “does nothing.” Do we not write “housewife” on the identity cards of women who have no income, signifying that they have no job, that they are “not working”? With the help of tradition and obligatory submissiveness, our sisters grow up more and more dependent, more and more dominated, more and more exploited, and with less and less free time for leisure.

While the young man’s road is strewn with opportunities to develop himself and take charge of his life, at every new stage of the young girl’s life the social straitjacket is pulled tighter around her. She will pay a heavy price for having been born female. And she will pay it throughout her whole life, until the weight of her toil and the effects of her physical and mental self-negation lead her to the day of eternal rest….

Whichever direction we turn—from the central plateau in the northeast, dominated by societies where power is highly centralized; to the west, where the powers of the village communities are decentralized; or to the southwest, the land of scattered collectives—the traditional form of social organization has at least one point in common: the subjugation of women. In our 8,000 villages, on our 600,000 plots of land, and in our million and more households, on the question of women we can see identical or similar approaches.

From one end of the country to the other, social cohesion as defined by men requires the subjugation of women and the subordination of the young. Our society, still too primitively agrarian, patriarchal, and polygamous by far, turns the woman into an object of exploitation for her labor power and of consumption for her reproductive capacity.

How do women manage to live out this peculiar dual identity, which makes them, at one and the same time, the vital knot that ties together the whole family by their presence and attention, guarantees its fundamental unity, and yet also makes them marginalized and ignored? The woman leads a twofold existence indeed, the depth of her social ostracism being equaled only by her own stoic endurance. In order to be able to live in harmony with the society of man, in order to obey his command, she envelops herself in demeaning and self-effacing detachment. She sacrifices herself to this.

Woman, you are the source of life, yet an object; mother, yet domestic servant; nurturer, yet pseudowoman; you can do the bidding of both son and hearth, yet you are invisible, faceless, and voiceless. You are the pivot, the unifier, yet a being in chains, shadow of the male shadow.

The woman is the pillar of family well-being, the midwife, washerwoman, cleaner, and cook. She is errand-runner, matron, farmer, healer, gardener, grinder, saleswoman, worker. She is labor power working with obsolete tools, putting in hundreds of thousands of hours for a hopeless level of production.

Every day our sisters, fighting as they are on the four fronts of our war against disease, hunger, poverty, and degeneracy, feel the pressure of changes over which they have no control. For every single one of the 800,000 males who emigrate from Burkina, a woman takes on an additional load. The two million Burkinabè men who live outside the country thus exacerbate the sexual imbalance that puts women today at 51.7 percent of the total population, or 52.1 percent of the potentially active population.

Too overburdened to give the necessary attention to her children, too exhausted to think of herself, the woman continues to slave away—the grinding wheel, wheel of fortune, drive wheel, spare wheel, the big wheel. Broken on the wheel and bullied, women, our sisters and wives, pay for creating life, for sustaining life. Socially they are relegated to third place, after the man and the child—just like the Third World, arbitrarily held back, the better to be dominated and exploited. Subjugated, the woman goes from a protective guardian who exploits her to one who dominates her and exploits her even more….

But one single night placed women at the heart of the family’s development and at the center of national solidarity. The dawn that followed the night of August 4, 1983, brought liberty with it, calling all of us to march together side by side in equality, as a single people joined by common goals. The August revolution found the Burkinabè woman in her state of subjugation, exploited by a neocolonial society deeply imbued with the ideology of backward social forces. She owed it to herself to break with these reactionary political views on women’s emancipation, so widely praised and followed until then. She owed it to herself to draw up with utmost clarity a new, just, and revolutionary political approach to her liberation.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home