The African Woman

By Mwalimu George Ngwane

Today, October 15, 2007 marks the 20th anniversary of the death of the pan African icon and the maverick leader of Burkina Faso, Captain Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara.

In one of his fiery oratories addressed to the Burkinabe women during the International Day of the Woman on March 8, 1987,Captain Sankara said "the genuine emancipation of women is that which entrusts responsibilities to them and involves them in productive activity and in the different struggles the people face".

As the world pays lip service today, October 15, to the rural woman by commemorating what has been pompously called the International Day of the Rural Woman, it behoves Africa to speak to the interwoven tapestry that binds the African woman to her bondaged society.

African woman, who are you? Are you a product of your own traditional evolution or an imitation of Eurocentric images? What values do you uphold? Those that maintain our strong African solidarity or those that pursue the blind alley of separate and individual advancement?

African woman, are you still the woman that Leopold Senghor describes as "clad in your black colour which is life/ your beauty strikes me to the heart /as lightning strikes the eagle?
Are you still the one who majestically ploughs the farms; replenishes the energy when we flag and ruin the entire humanity?

Are you still the nightingale who sings the lullaby when the world is still snoring?Yes, my African woman you remain to us the cradle of African civilisation and the fertility of your womb shall be as perennial as the River Nile.

You are Makeda of Sheba of Axum, you are Dahlia Al Kahina who gave Arab invaders fierce resistance when they sought to snatch our land, you are Yaa Asantewa, you are the spirit medium Nehanda, you are Amina conqueror of Kano, Nupe and Katsina, you are Idia Queen, mother and daughter of Africa; indeed you are Sumediang, the Eve of my own civilistion.

Stand up and be counted not just as one who attended Beijing but one who speaks in the face of human greed; as one who fights against the unequal distribution of our resources; as one who stands by the flag of the United States of Africa.

Tell the IMF and the World Bank that their economic strangulations have turned your husbands into beggars in paradise.Tell the African man to turn his gun into a spade and his military truck into a tractor so together we can build a confidence-prone and conflict-proof Africa.

Appeal to our traditional leaders to eradicate those customs that hold you in perpetual servitude.  Tell our political leaders to provide enabling governance that knows neither party symbols nor ethnic colours but one that truly weds to the lyrics of anthem and constitution.

As the rural woman continues to feed posterity let us all sing the songs of democratic development using our own ebony voices, let us in own hieroglyphics write the cultural history of our heroes and sheroes; let us with own tam tam play the beats of our collective African hood.

And like the great Sankara once said "May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women's silence.  I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt. 

I await and hope for the fertile eruption of the revolution through which they will transmit the power and the rigorous justice issued from their oppressed wombs" Yes, African woman, this is your hour but let each second tick with the words of our ancestors 'Nkosi sikeleli Africa ".

Comments

[Anne Lutomia]

It is always refreshing to be reminded to study myself as an African woman and what I represent, thank you.