Thomas Sankara et la condition féminine: un discours révolutionnaire?

1.2 THE MARXISM- LENINISM

However our step would be more convincing, if the analysis could seek sources on the side of the biography of Sankara or side of the History. Indeed Sankara is explicitly located itself in a political thought Leninist Marxist. In 1972, it adheres to the Gathering communist officers (ROCK). It reads Marx, Lénine and Mao, authors who preach the seizure of power by the oppressed classes.

Sankara openly recognizes the membership of its feminist vision to the Marxism-Leninism. It notes on this subject « we must with dialectic materialism have undoubtedly projected on the problems of the female condition the strongest light, that which enables us to determine the problem of the exploitation of the woman inside a generalized operating system »^73(*). Sankara is inspired explicitly by the origin of the family, the private property and the State (1884) of Engels. It indicates that « Engels made the state of development of the techniques but also of the historical control of the woman who was born with the appearance of the private property, with the favor of the passage of a mode of production with another, of an organization to another »^74(*). Indeed, conscious that the woman occupies a vital place in the company, Marx and Engels register the Women's Liberation like a condition essential to happiness in the city. According to them, the woman is in a lower situation starting from the advent of the patriarchal family which imposed the oppression of the woman. Indeed, the paternal right replaced that maternal thus confirming the effective supremacy of the man at the house^75(*). This oppression is comparable with that of the classes with the emergence of the State.

In the Origin of the family, private property and of the State (Moscow, Progress, 1976), precise Engels: « With the patriarchal family as apparatus of oppression of the classes which are dominated and exploited on the scale of the total company. The family and the State are the framework of processes which make it possible the social organization to remain in spite of the fights and the oppositions which tear it and which result on the one hand, of the economic inequality between the classes of producers »^76(*). From this comparison, it comes out that the source of any inequality is and remains the private property. Engels makes a parallel narrow between the dominated women and classes. Necessarily the release of the ones and others passes by the abolition of the private property. Engels supports like « the oppression of the women and the dominated classes has like base the private property born from the division of the labor in the social production. Their fate is thus dependant, the Women's Liberation and from the dominated classes pass by the abolition of the economic structures founded on the private property »^77(*). In addition, the participation of the woman in the production is a condition necessary to its emancipation. This fact it is necessary that it is released significantly from the house work perceived like a negligible supplement with the production work of the man^78(*). The woman as a worker is a citizen equal to the man. The emancipation has a bond with the female participation in the social production. Consequently, the housework, until carried out there by the woman, must be released from the education and the care of the children, only way to enable him to carry out a free sexual life. All these measurements call into question the preponderance of the man and the indissociability of the marriage. The result would be the free love, one « higher form of monogamy »^79(*).

Thus the Marxism-Leninism tries to define the free union and the sexual intercourse in socialist mode.^80(*) New relationship between the man and the woman must thus contribute to the suppression of the prostitution.

Marx and Engels thus offer to Sankara a framework of theoretical analysis allowing to sit his own study of the African company.

* ⁷³ GAKUNZI (D) COp cit., p. 223.

* ⁷⁴ GAKUNZI (D) COp cit., p. 224.

* ⁷⁵ Engels (F) the Origin of the family of the property and the State, Paris Social Editions 1983, p. 271.

* ⁷⁶ POIRIER (J), «  Element for problems materialist of the human reproduction  », in Gauveau (D) and alt (under the direction of)  : Demography and underdevelopment in the Third World Center for developing Area Studies Mc Gill University, Quebec, 1986, p. 286.

* ⁷⁷ POIRIER (J), COp cit., p. 286.

* ⁷⁸ ENGELS (F), the origin of the family, the private property and the State, Paris Social Editions, 1983, p 271.

* ⁷⁹ ENGELS (F), COp cit., p. 333.

* ⁸⁰ Russet-red (J), Precise theoretical history and of the Marxism- Leninism, Paris Robert Lafont, 1969, p. 322- 333.