"By her active and courageous role in the struggle to win national sovereignty, African women have earned the unwritten right to play a full part in the national reconstruction and in the historical rehabilitation of our people." [Seku Ture]
African women everywhere serve on the front line of our struggle. They served in every national resistance struggle in Africa, up to 30% in armed struggles in Eritrea and Zimbabwe. They led successful anti-tax and anti-pass demonstrations against brutal colonial and settler-colonial regimes in Nigeria, Mali and South Africa. Women in the diaspora opened the door for massive demonstrations in the "Civil Rights" struggle, and sustained the boycotts being more than 80% of the ground forces in the Montgomery bus boycott in the United States.
African Women are not queens on a stool, or one who is untouchable, non-thinking, and unable to work. Our status is not queens of drudgery or one enslaved in the labor intensive work which is given absolutely no value. African women are active, working members of society.
African women from rural areas in Haiti to the urban centers of Lagos, Nigeria, are inaccurately portrayed. We are viewed as simply victims of African men and traditional customs, with very little knowledge of our oppression. These imperialist media driven portrayals have but one objective, to cover-up the historical role of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism on the oppression of African women.
As African women we must first view ourselves as Africans. The primary problem that confronts Africa (Our Home) is factually based on five-hundred years of exploitation and rule by foreign/outsiders. These outsiders, who we correctly call imperialists have used our minerals, agricultural resources, and African labor (women and men) to grow rich. This has left Africa, the richest continent, with masses of her people unable to feed themselves; lacking housing and medical care; the majority of our people cannot read; we have inadequate communication networks; lack of productive employment; and our children are dying from preventable diseases. African women are at the bottom of this scale.
Slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism have inflicted considerable physical and mental devastation on us as a people. Neo-Colonial puppets throughout the African world, who act as overseer for imperialist financial and military interests, perceive western values and culture as superior to anything African. But we must be clear, it was Western European historians and scholars who attempted to remove Africa from world history. Their intellectual counterparts of today are those who lead the fight to mis-write the history of African women. African women must understand that one of the fronts in the war against colonialism and neo-colonialism that we must wage is the writing of our own story.
Our story, as African women scattered by slavery and colonized by imperialist forces can only be properly told in the context of our struggle for total emancipation. Our story, the struggle to emancipate African women, is an integral part of the objective of Pan-Africanism: the total liberation and Unification of Africa under Scientific Socialism.
It is the achievement of Pan-Africanism that will smash imperialism and neo-colonialism from Cape to Cairo. Pan-Africanism will restore African Women their humanity, it will remove the oppression and exploitation that African women struggle against daily. It is Pan-Africanism that will enable us to determine how we use the natural resources of Africa. Pan-Africanism is the Only Solution for African People!
Our story reflects African women as heads of states as well as military strategist and leaders. Our story reveals the outstanding achievements and contributions made by African women to Africa and the world. African women must tell Our Story. The enemies of our people have consistently omitted and rewritten Our Story to justify their exploitation of Africa and its natural resources and the oppression of her daughters and sons.
African women during communalism enjoyed a much greater form of equality but this does not mean traditional Africa was void of contradictions regarding the conditions of African women. During the feudalistic periods (which is a part of traditional Africa) in some African societies women began to experience greater levels of oppression and exploitation. As we tell Our Story we must be faithful to the facts and African women will determine, will decide, what features of traditional Africa are positive for women and what we must keep.
The imperialists were outlaws. Through slavery (which separated us from our land) and colonialism (where they physically took over African land) they changed the quality of life of African women, more so than any other historical period. The land was our means of maintaining life, of maintaining society, land was our means of livelihood. During colonialism Our Story took a dramatic turn. With our land now in the hands of the colonialist criminals, we as a People were forced to sell our labor and bodies to these same criminals. Africans were defeated on the battlefield and dispossessed of their land. The land was then expropriated for settler-occupation.
We were in essence deprived of our means of contributing to society, we were deprived of our work. We became slave laborers, squatters, or wives of slave laborers. We must regard the repossession of our Land as the first step in the emancipation of African women. The national liberation struggle requires the full participation of African women on every front. We say to African men we will not compromise on this issue. We say to the enemies of our people, who now control the land through their Neo-colonial stooges and finance capital, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank included; we will not compromise on the question of our land or our resources.
African women, the first thing we must do to secure our emancipation is to defeat imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, as we move to smash exploitation that is based on class, nationality and gender. We refuse to engage in an adversarial or antagonistic relationship with African men, because their oppressor is also the same oppressor of women. The R-TAC realizes that this common struggle to liberate women and the masses of African people can best be conducted inside revolutionary Pan-African organization. African women we will not become embroiled in a feminist movement which tells us that our priority is womanhood liberation and not African liberation. The feminist movement must be seen for what it is - reformist and not a Revolutionary movement. To view women's rights outside the context of the whole society in which she belongs, is to separate women from the society and to view her as a separate compartment. Women do not exist in a vacuum by themselves, just as African men do not and can not exist by themselves. We are mutually dependent on each other for our survival. African women and men must understand and appreciate that our roles and responsibilities must be adaptable to the changing conditions of society - changes that flow from the cultural and historical necessities of African People.
"Social Revolution must therefore have standing firmly behind it an intellectual revolution, a revolution in which our thinking and philosophy are directed towards the redemption of our society. This requires two aims: first the restitution of the egalitarianism of human society, and second the logistical mobilization of all our resources towards the attainment of that restitution. What is called for, as a first step, is a body of connected thought which will determine the general nature of our action in unifying the traditional African society." [Nkrumah] We are creating the conditions for an egalitarian relationship, as equal responsible combatants in the struggle to liberate our nation. It is through political education (work and study) that this transformation of African women and men occurs. African women learn to politicize and organize not just women but all sectors of our society. The Union can establish the conditions where African women's participation in revolutionary organizations is the norm; which in fact, is a major part of the social revolution, the restoration of egalitarian conditions, those conditions that women enjoyed in communal African life. There can be no Social Revolution, no African Revolution without the liberation of women.
African women, as a part of the African Nation, are being attacked by imperialist control of our land, labor and resources. In the industrial world, capitalism blames African women for bringing down the African family. And at home in Africa, imperialism sees that she receives little education to guarantee the stagnation of our People. Wherever we look , the masses of African women are struggling at subsistence levels to take care of their families whereas their organization and political education can be discouraged.
The exploitation of African women as we now know it, became crystallized with the development of capitalism. For example, it is not enough to talk about the relationship between African women and men if we do not discuss our social relationships as a consequence of the political and economic upheaval. African women as a critical and vital part of our nation must demand revolutionary change in order to get a permanent solution to these problems. And the solution is to be found in a revolutionary, Pan-Africanist organization.
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