In the bustling streets of our cities, in silent villages, in homes that should be sanctuaries, a heart-wrenching reality persists: gender-based violence continues to crush the lives, dreams, and destinies of African women.
The Invisible Face of Violence
Every day, thousands of our sisters, mothers, daughters suffer violence that goes beyond physical blows. It is a muted, insidious violence that seeps into our traditions, institutions, and intimate relationships.
The Mechanisms of Silence
Gender violence takes multiple and complex forms, infiltrating the most intimate spaces of our lives:
A husband who decides alone on the family’s future represents more than a unilateral decision. It is a profound mechanism of control where the woman is deprived of her ability to co-construct her own destiny. Each imposed choice, each decision made without consultation progressively erodes the woman’s autonomy and dignity, reducing her to a subject rather than an actor in her own life.
A young girl denied education to marry a man she did not choose embodies the very negation of her potential. Education, that remarkable social elevator, is brutally confiscated from her. Her body becomes a bargaining chip, her dreams sacrificed on the altar of patriarchal traditions that transform marriage into a contract where she has no say. Each stolen school year is a mutilated future, a confiscated freedom.
A woman fired because she refuses her superior’s advances demonstrates the systemic violence exercised in professional spaces. Sexual blackmail becomes a mechanism of power, where the female body is perceived as a negotiable territory. Refusing means risking one’s career, one’s means of subsistence. It is a cruel dilemma where economic survival is weighed against personal dignity.
A girl child subjected to female genital mutilation in the name of deadly traditions represents the paroxysm of violence against female bodies. This is not a cultural act, but a programmed mutilation that denies physical and psychological integrity. Each genital mutilation is a trauma that traverses generations, a social control inscribed in the very flesh of women.
Our Bodies, Our Battles
Our bodies are political battlefields. Each genital mutilation, each forced marriage, each sexual assault is an act of negation of our humanity.
In Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan, everywhere on the continent, we pay the price of a patriarchal system that considers us objects.
Transformation, Our Power
But we are not victims. We are survivors, resisters.
Every day, women file complaints, breaking the silence that protects aggressors. Each testimony is an act of courage that weakens systems of domination, that makes the invisible visible, that transforms an individual experience of violence into a collective struggle.
Women defend their rights, becoming advocates of their own freedom. They use the law as a shield, speech as a weapon, education as a lever of transformation. Each right defended is a stone added to the edifice of equality.
Others educate their communities, understanding that profound change can only come through awareness. In schools, churches, markets, they deconstruct myths, challenge norms, show other possibilities.
Associations are born, weaving networks of solidarity. They offer legal, psychological, economic support. They create spaces of speech, reconstruction, resilience.
Some fight legally, transforming the judicial system from within. They become judges, lawyers, legislators, rewriting laws to truly protect.
Our Manifesto
We demand the full respect of our rights, uncompromising justice, equal education, an end to impunity, the deconstruction of patriarchal norms.
Gender violence is not a fate. It is a social choice that together, we can and must deconstruct.
We are more than what is inflicted upon us. We are the revolution.
A call to solidarity, to dignity, to transformation.