Women's Liberation and the African Freedom
SynopsisPlot
“There is no true social revolution without the liberation of women,” explains the leader of the 1983-87 revolution in Burkina Faso. Workers and peasants in that West African country established a popular revolutionary government and began to combat the hunger, illiteracy, and economic backwardness imposed by imperialist domination.
Story
About this book
Thomas Sankara led the revolution in Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987, during which a popular government based on workers and peasants pursued broad social reforms. This short book gathers his statements on the connection between women's liberation and wider political transformation in the West African country. Sankara argued that no society could achieve genuine revolution while women remained excluded from public life and economic participation.
Burkina Faso, known before 1984 as Upper Volta, faced deep poverty, widespread illiteracy, and dependence on outside economies. The revolutionary government tried to change these conditions through land redistribution, literacy work, and mass vaccination campaigns. Sankara placed the position of women at the center of that program, treating inequality between women and men as both a cause and a result of the country's structural problems.
The volume runs to 69 pages and was published by Pathfinder Press, with a preface by Mary-Alice Waters and an introduction by Michel Prairie. This second edition, issued in 2007, includes a map, photographs, notes, and an index. As a primary document, it records how one head of state framed the rights of women inside a broader plan for social change in 1980s West Africa.
