Ahmed Sekou Toure - The Role of Women in The Revolution

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Courtesy of Dr. Mychal Odom

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The Position of Women

(p3-6)
If African women cannot possibly conduct their struggle in isolation from the struggle that our people wage for African liberation, African freedom, conversely, is not effective unless it brings about the liberation of African women.

A people’s freedom is not measured by the rights that a fraction of this people enjoy; it is measured by the degree of equality of the rights and duties of all elements of the community, irrespective of creed, education, race, sex or wealth.

Under foreign rule the traditional patterns of African society were gradually supplanted by negative values; this process eventually resulted in the degradation of the position of women in our society, depriving them of their most sacred human rights.

It should be recalled that in several African societies matriarchy conferred upon women a paramount social and even political role and that quite generally the participation of women in the economic, social and cultural life used to be no less than that of men. While in family life she enjoyed full authority to care for the interests of the family and educate the children.

However, colonialist examples of spoliation, arbitrary authority, oppression and exploitation brought about a reversal of the traditional social order, victimizing women most cruelly, Now, fortunately, the progress of decolonization and African unity which dominates Africa’s political situation is tending to put the process of evolution of our people on a quite different path from that which the colonial and imperialist powers had been trying to impose on us.

The condition of womanhood in Africa is one aspect of the general condition of the African peoples which was seriously impaired by colonial oppression and exploitation The economic exploitation which robbed our people of their riches and of the fruits of their labour, while making for the prosperity of financial and economic trust in the “metropoles.” spared no single section of the African population. Our countries were regarded as reservoirs of raw materials that they had to export in huge quantities to feed Western Industry. Our workers had to sustain the crushing burden of all-out exploitation of their physical and intellectual energies for a wage not even sufficient to secure adequate food. As to our farmers, the colonial system regarded them only in terms of export crops, while thousands died of starvation every year. Thus, the economic life of African territories was dominated by the law of colonial profit: buying African primary commodities dirt cheap and selling imported manufactured goods at a profit of two hundred, three hundred, or five hundred per cent. In war time, Africans were enrolled as cannon fodder; European wars made countless African widows and orphans, plunging many african families into mourning.

In the context of that over-all predicament, was it possible to think of the emancipation of African women while the peoples to which they belonged were subject to the most inhuman slavery, one which transforms the slave into a thing, a tool, an instrument for the welfare of his master? 

(p10)
Our mothers and our sisters fully realized that social liberation must be preceded by liberation from foreign domination, and throughout Africa played an important and ofter decisive part in the struggle against colonialism for national liberation. today they can proudly claim to have contributed to the irreversible victory of the African peoples over the forces of domination, exploitation and oppression. By her active and courageous participation in the struggle to re-win national sovereignty, the african woman has earned the unwritten right to play a full part in national reconstruction and in the historical rehabilitation of our peoples.