Thomas Sankara
“Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. 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.”
― Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle
“He who feeds you, controls you.”
― Thomas Sankara
“Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail . We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on Earth to rule all of humanity.”
― Thomas Sankara
“I can hear the roar of women’s silence”
― Thomas Sankara
“Our revolution is not a public-speaking tournament. Our revolution is not a battle of fine phrases. Our revolution is not simply for spouting slogans that are no more than signals used by manipulators trying to use them as catchwords, as codewords, as a foil for their own display. Our revolution is, and should continue to be, the collective effort of revolutionaries to transform reality, to improve the concrete situation of the masses of our country.”
― Thomas Sankara
“Humankind does not submit passively to the power of nature. It takes control over this power. This process is not an internal or subjective one. It takes place objectively in practice, once women cease to be viewed as mere sexual beings, once we look beyond their biological functions and become conscious of their weight as an active social force. What’s more, woman’s consciousness of herself is not only a product of her sexuality. It reflects her position as determined by the economic structure of society, which in turn expresses the level reached by humankind in technological development and the relations between classes.
The importance of dialectical materialism lies in going beyond the inherent limits of biology, rejecting simplistic theories about our being slaves to the nature of our species, and, instead, placing facts in their social and economic context.”
― Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle
“The specific character of [women’s] oppression cannot be explained away by equating different situations through superficial and childish simplifications[:]
It is true that both the woman and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current system, the worker’s wife is also condemned to silence by her worker-husband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use physical differences as their pretext.”
― Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle
“Il faut choisir entre le champagne pour quelques-uns ou l’eau potable pour tous.”
― Thomas Sankara
“Un militaire sans formation politique n’est qu’un criminel en puissance.”
― Thomas Sankara
“Per ottenere un cambiamento radicale bisogna avere il coraggio d’inventare l’avvenire. Noi dobbiamo osare inventare l’avvenire.”
― Thomas Sankara
“Nous ne parlons pas de l’émancipation des femmes par charité, mais parce que pour nous c’est une base nécessaire pour le triomphe de notre révolution.”
― Thomas Sankara
“The woman leads a twofold existence indeed, the depth of her social ostracism being equally only by her stoic endurance. To live in harmony with the society of man, to conform with men’s demands, she resigns herself to a self-effacement that is demeaning, she sacrifices herself.”
― Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle