Similar to commemorations around African history, recognition of women’s history has evolved to include the entire month of March annually. Of course, for conscious students of history, women’s history, and the history for all oppressed humanity, is every day all year long, but since we have March dedicated to focusing on women, we should use this as a tactical imperative.
And let us be clear that as African revolutionaries, we will use March specifically to focus on the contributions of African women freedom fighters. The focus should also extend to marginalized gender African people, who make uncompromising contributions to our people’s forward liberation.
This focus is absolutely necessary because patriarchy is a chief appendage of the international capitalist and imperialist systems. What this means is capitalism/imperialism institutionalize the systemic oppression and exploitation of women and marginalized gender folks as a tool to uphold the status quo. In other words, without white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, etc., it would be much easier for people to see that the primary contradiction that adversely impacts their daily lives is international capital. For example, as Europe, zionist israel, the U.S., etc., experience the continued decline of international capitalism, the response of this system is ratcheting up fascist policies. This is done to focus people’s attention on the oppressed as the cause of their suffering, instead of the system itself. Patriarchy and the other appendage sub-systems of oppression play their roles well in maintaining a smoke screen around these questions.
One of the manifestations of these disparities is African women who stand up against injustice, who dedicate their lives to fighting against systems of oppression, are completely written out of history. This is why if you chose 10 people from anywhere in the world and ask them to identify two women by picture, one of those women being Cardi B the entertainer from the U.S., and the other being Teodora Gomes the revolutionary activist from Guinea-Bissau, eight out of ten of those people, regardless of where they are born or live, would properly I.D. Cardi B while not even one out of ten could identify Teodora Gomes.
This isn’t intended to be a knock against Cardi B who is an unquestionably talented young woman. The point is the Cardi B’s of the world offer no threat to the interests of the capitalist system (in fact, most of the time they uplift those interests). This is the reason non-revolutionary women are provided unlimited platforms to the extent that the values they represent are normalized. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, radical, revolutionary African women are marginalized as insane, unreasonable, and unworthy of recognition and respect.
Imagine for a moment a world where we are able to develop collective consensus that a campaign to advance the notion of revolutionary African women is endorsed. If we take African populations for all 58 areas in Africa, countries and islands, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere, that’s an estimated 2.5 billion people of African descent. Factoring in the daily and continued anti-Africa/n propaganda from the capitalist/imperialist system (“I’m not African, I’m…”) and the general malaise and individualism which characterizes existence in this profit over people world we currently live in, let’s just say our campaign starts out small at two (2) percent, meaning just 2% of our people are on board to do the work of this Campaign for Consciousness Around African Women. That’s 500,000 people out of 2.5 billion. Even in this current world, that’s not an unrealistic number, but we can reduce it even more and say only 0.5% percent are participating, or 125,000 people.
This 125,000 people generates a campaign budget and using crowd sourcing and other materials, funds are raised to wage the campaign. Most logical people would agree this is achievable. Included in that work would be the development of materials in the primary languages that African people speak worldwide like English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Swahili. To this some of you who don’t have the revolutionary Pan-Africanist organizing experience that those of us in organizations like the All African People’s Revolutionary Party possess, you may think this impossible. The good news for you is we have already started doing this with multiple languages in our international Pan-African work so this is entirely possible.
Then, the campaign goes to work instituting educational initiatives everywhere for young people (and not so young people) and doing that work on a consistent basis all over the African world. There is curriculum designed to normalize the lives, work, and examples of African women like Shirley Graham DuBois, Andree Blouin, Imbalia Camara, Teodora Gomes, Titina Sila, Carmen Peirera, Elizabeth Sibeko, Assata Shakur, Mawaina Kouyate, Gloria Richardson, Ethel Minor, Fatima Mohammad Bernawi, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Amy Jacque Garvey, etc. Notice that none of these women are business owners, politicians within the capitalist system, or entertainers. All of them are freedom fighters, most of whom either organized, supported, or participated in armed struggle against the enemies of Africa and humanity. Certainly, all of them upheld the principles of justice and forward human progress over individual comfort and advancement into the capitalist system.
What if we engaged in a campaign like this? At the very least, we could count upon seeing an increased consciousness of the conditions of women, respect for women, and a much greater understanding that we as men cannot even ever imagine freedom and self-determination without the question of women’s freedom being front and center to everything that we do. The campaign would normalize an understanding of the word patriarchy and its daily manifestations in the lives of African women. This would raise the bar considerably for all people and increase the commitment to see this system eradicated. This reality automatically translates into more people joining organizations and therefore owning the change that they now see the importance of.
The question about how to get men on board with this type of campaign is answered by strategically making this question the center of our lives for a period of time i.e. an annual campaign, internationally. Men being required to do this work and uphold the principles of such a campaign. It will take a lot of principled struggle, but this is the stuff in which worthwhile campaigns are built from.
It should be easy enough to see how this type of work raises the bar for men, women, and margainalized gender folks which raises the bar for our people overall in our struggle for justice. Something like this isn’t rocket science and its not reinventing the wheel. Every successful campaign to improve people’s consciousness has been carried out this way from the literacy campaign in the Cuban revolution in the early 1960s to the anti-women castration campaign carried out by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola in Angola in the 1970s (of course the imposition of International Monetary Fund destruction of social campaigns pushed back those gains in Angola in the 2000s).
For African men who claim to be anti-patriarchal, this should be a call to action. For women who work for anti-patriarchal change, humbly speaking, this is a suggestion for how to attack problems you wake up daily contemplating how to engage. The only thing holding us back from doing this work would be our unwillingness to try. We certainly owe our future generations our best and most sincere efforts to change. When I once asked my father (rest in power) whether I should go back and get an advanced degree, his intelligent response to me was “If you live long enough, you will be 50 one day. You’ll either be 50 with an advanced degree or 50 without one, so you may as well have one!” This incredible logic came from a man who wasn’t even able to complete high school due to Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. The same logic applies to implementing this type of ANTI-patriarchy campaign. This is a call to action. Who will respond?
And let us be clear that as African revolutionaries, we will use March specifically to focus on the contributions of African women freedom fighters. The focus should also extend to marginalized gender African people, who make uncompromising contributions to our people’s forward liberation.
This focus is absolutely necessary because patriarchy is a chief appendage of the international capitalist and imperialist systems. What this means is capitalism/imperialism institutionalize the systemic oppression and exploitation of women and marginalized gender folks as a tool to uphold the status quo. In other words, without white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, etc., it would be much easier for people to see that the primary contradiction that adversely impacts their daily lives is international capital. For example, as Europe, zionist israel, the U.S., etc., experience the continued decline of international capitalism, the response of this system is ratcheting up fascist policies. This is done to focus people’s attention on the oppressed as the cause of their suffering, instead of the system itself. Patriarchy and the other appendage sub-systems of oppression play their roles well in maintaining a smoke screen around these questions.
One of the manifestations of these disparities is African women who stand up against injustice, who dedicate their lives to fighting against systems of oppression, are completely written out of history. This is why if you chose 10 people from anywhere in the world and ask them to identify two women by picture, one of those women being Cardi B the entertainer from the U.S., and the other being Teodora Gomes the revolutionary activist from Guinea-Bissau, eight out of ten of those people, regardless of where they are born or live, would properly I.D. Cardi B while not even one out of ten could identify Teodora Gomes.
This isn’t intended to be a knock against Cardi B who is an unquestionably talented young woman. The point is the Cardi B’s of the world offer no threat to the interests of the capitalist system (in fact, most of the time they uplift those interests). This is the reason non-revolutionary women are provided unlimited platforms to the extent that the values they represent are normalized. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, radical, revolutionary African women are marginalized as insane, unreasonable, and unworthy of recognition and respect.
Imagine for a moment a world where we are able to develop collective consensus that a campaign to advance the notion of revolutionary African women is endorsed. If we take African populations for all 58 areas in Africa, countries and islands, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere, that’s an estimated 2.5 billion people of African descent. Factoring in the daily and continued anti-Africa/n propaganda from the capitalist/imperialist system (“I’m not African, I’m…”) and the general malaise and individualism which characterizes existence in this profit over people world we currently live in, let’s just say our campaign starts out small at two (2) percent, meaning just 2% of our people are on board to do the work of this Campaign for Consciousness Around African Women. That’s 500,000 people out of 2.5 billion. Even in this current world, that’s not an unrealistic number, but we can reduce it even more and say only 0.5% percent are participating, or 125,000 people.
This 125,000 people generates a campaign budget and using crowd sourcing and other materials, funds are raised to wage the campaign. Most logical people would agree this is achievable. Included in that work would be the development of materials in the primary languages that African people speak worldwide like English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Swahili. To this some of you who don’t have the revolutionary Pan-Africanist organizing experience that those of us in organizations like the All African People’s Revolutionary Party possess, you may think this impossible. The good news for you is we have already started doing this with multiple languages in our international Pan-African work so this is entirely possible.
Then, the campaign goes to work instituting educational initiatives everywhere for young people (and not so young people) and doing that work on a consistent basis all over the African world. There is curriculum designed to normalize the lives, work, and examples of African women like Shirley Graham DuBois, Andree Blouin, Imbalia Camara, Teodora Gomes, Titina Sila, Carmen Peirera, Elizabeth Sibeko, Assata Shakur, Mawaina Kouyate, Gloria Richardson, Ethel Minor, Fatima Mohammad Bernawi, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Amy Jacque Garvey, etc. Notice that none of these women are business owners, politicians within the capitalist system, or entertainers. All of them are freedom fighters, most of whom either organized, supported, or participated in armed struggle against the enemies of Africa and humanity. Certainly, all of them upheld the principles of justice and forward human progress over individual comfort and advancement into the capitalist system.
What if we engaged in a campaign like this? At the very least, we could count upon seeing an increased consciousness of the conditions of women, respect for women, and a much greater understanding that we as men cannot even ever imagine freedom and self-determination without the question of women’s freedom being front and center to everything that we do. The campaign would normalize an understanding of the word patriarchy and its daily manifestations in the lives of African women. This would raise the bar considerably for all people and increase the commitment to see this system eradicated. This reality automatically translates into more people joining organizations and therefore owning the change that they now see the importance of.
The question about how to get men on board with this type of campaign is answered by strategically making this question the center of our lives for a period of time i.e. an annual campaign, internationally. Men being required to do this work and uphold the principles of such a campaign. It will take a lot of principled struggle, but this is the stuff in which worthwhile campaigns are built from.
It should be easy enough to see how this type of work raises the bar for men, women, and margainalized gender folks which raises the bar for our people overall in our struggle for justice. Something like this isn’t rocket science and its not reinventing the wheel. Every successful campaign to improve people’s consciousness has been carried out this way from the literacy campaign in the Cuban revolution in the early 1960s to the anti-women castration campaign carried out by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola in Angola in the 1970s (of course the imposition of International Monetary Fund destruction of social campaigns pushed back those gains in Angola in the 2000s).
For African men who claim to be anti-patriarchal, this should be a call to action. For women who work for anti-patriarchal change, humbly speaking, this is a suggestion for how to attack problems you wake up daily contemplating how to engage. The only thing holding us back from doing this work would be our unwillingness to try. We certainly owe our future generations our best and most sincere efforts to change. When I once asked my father (rest in power) whether I should go back and get an advanced degree, his intelligent response to me was “If you live long enough, you will be 50 one day. You’ll either be 50 with an advanced degree or 50 without one, so you may as well have one!” This incredible logic came from a man who wasn’t even able to complete high school due to Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. The same logic applies to implementing this type of ANTI-patriarchy campaign. This is a call to action. Who will respond?
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