Awa Thiam
Feminist from Senegal
Awa Thiam was born 1950 is a Senegalese politician, academic, writer, and activist. She serves as Senegal's Director of the National Center for Assistance and Training of Women under the Ministry of Women and Children. She is an advocate against female genital mutilation (FGM), which she speaks on in her 1978 book La Parole aux négresses (also published in English in 1986 as Black Sisters, Speak Out: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa). She has a body of work published internationally, in both French and English. In 1982, she founded the Commission pour l'Abolition des Mutilations Sexuelles (CAMS, or Commission for the Abolition of Sexual Mutilation, in English), which fights for the abolition of FGM.
Quotes
edit- The European view point of exploitation of women in Europe compared to the African American women shows an inaccurate judgment.
- Women must fight and realize the system that is controlling and denying them, that system is patriarchal and phallocratic. Many were unconscious whether to rebel against this system that exploits them or accept it and remained in slavery. So many women were confused on what they should do because if they rebel they were dehumanized and disposed of.
- Phallocratic and patriarchy maintained sexual violence and controlled women. Their way of controlling was to rape, female genital mutilation, force marriage and polygamy. European did not succeed in wiping out the black African civilization. The mothers/ancestors of the country, they held on to their belief to keep African civilization alive.
- In the phallocratic system European women and African women suffers oppression and exploitation by the capitalist as the male worker. Women also struggle wage on their own native land. Women and man fighting and bearing arms for the liberation of their country, only then they are seen to be equal as man. Women are capable just as men in assimilating skills of guerrilla warfare.
- The European feminist imposed the false argument “Rape is to women what lynching is to Blacks”. Women in the text suffered from double domination and double enslavement by the colonial phallocratic.