BY NOW we ought to have elected our new president — but this has not happened. President Macky Sall has delayed the elections which had been due to take place in February, sparking outcry. During this crisis, we have seen shameful images of uniformed members of our defence and security forces attacking women. 

Absa Hane, a journalist, was arrested while working; her male colleagues untroubled. Another woman, supposedly a protester, was manhandled into the back of a black pick-up truck, filmed by mobile phones. In these uncertain times more than ever, the condition of women is a feminist concern. 

Nothing can ever be taken for granted, not democracy… certainly not women’s rights. It only takes political crises for rights to be undermined, trampled on or withdrawn. 

Here, the fate of women hangs on the fury of men. Rape, sexual assault and physical and psychological violence against women are on the rise. 

The International Criminal Court recognises them as a weapon of war. But if war is a way for a state to continue its policies, how could it be otherwise for male religious or cultural groups and powers such as the police? Their ideological and political systems crush or take away women’s rights, the better to exploit their bodies. A political crisis is, therefore, an excellent means of perpetuating and aggravating male violence. 

In Senegal, few feminists claim to be radical ones. But all feminists agree that patriarchy is a system, as conceptualised by radical feminists. They are very quick to react to gender, social and political inequalities, but they do not know that we also owe the adaptation of Marxist thought to feminism to materialist and radical feminism, particularly the class struggle.

No Senegalese feminist can deny that religious political ideology — of all stripes — affects the less well-off every day and that its powerful lobby, in this secular republic, dictates the direction of women’s rights. 

This lobby is combined with the power, instituted and written into the laws of our family code, in men’s hands. In it the term “power,” paternal or marital, is given 82 times to the Senegalese man. The husband holds and exercises it throughout the marriage, unless otherwise provided for by a judge. 

Outside of marriage, women may have certain rights, including joint parental authority over their children. However, studies such as those by Marieme Ndiaye (2016) on Senegalese family law, show that these issues are often left to the discretion of a judge. The court may decide to withdraw custody rights from the mother in the event of remarriage to a foreigner or a non-Muslim, for example. 

While the head of state boasted of legal advances in a speech on July 18 last year, he also insisted that they are not intended to change things in the cultural context of Senegal. 

While Western international pacts may be approaching that could inspire policies that economically empower women, entrepreneurial Senegalese women have been distinguishing themselves for millennia. 

Women exploited by galloping capitalism have had to, in order to feed their families and compensate for the inability of the head of the family to do so, or because he has abandoned them to contract another marriage. However, it is always easier to highlight those opportune “cultural practices,” cults or customs, than it is to enforce laws.

Access to quality healthcare is another area where the less fortunate, particularly women, are affected. It is the less wealthy who die in childbirth, or who end up in Liberte 6, the women’s prison, for abortion or neonaticide. 

It is the women who have no support who are subjected to severe social exclusion, whether they have terminated a pregnancy or let it go to term. Never fathers, never men, the “too devout” who are in no way troubled by paternity tests, themselves prohibited by law. 

Few, other than feminists, take up the cause of the poorest. These women who have been left behind are always seen as guilty, sinful; they are pointed out and vilified everywhere. 

Even women who have been subjected to rape can see the medical certificate attesting to it delivered to the press at the same time as intimate details about them, which everyone can discuss at their leisure.

French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser postulated the ideological apparatus of the state — culture, religion, education, etc — as a superstructure. Its aim, alongside the sovereign and repressive structures of the state (the police), is to subject the rest of the population to bourgeois and conservative ideology (of their powers and privileges). 

When it is firmly religious, it becomes almost unassailable, with those attempting to challenge it at risk of being perceived as a heretic or of attracting the wrath of God’s fools. 

Pregnant MP Amy Ndiaye was slapped in the middle of the National Assembly on December 1 2022, for challenging the deference required to a religious leader-politician. 

Presidential candidate in 2024 Anta Babacar Ngom has come under heavy fire from men who are trying to downgrade and delegitimise her, on the grounds that she is a “chicken seller,” as the owner of the franchise of KFC in Senegal. 

These men include a deputy dressed in a traditional boubou belching from the rostrum of the assembly and a former dandy of the Paris bar, now a minister, who struggles to defend the action of the state to journalists. At least she knows what it means to work. While others owe their survival only to privileges bestowed on them by their master.

Thus, once again, in Senegal, the land of Teranga — hospitality — which smells of sulphur, we will once again celebrate the day of struggle for women’s rights on March 8. But it rings hollow as those applauded for this by all the international institutions, covered by immunities and rooted in Senegal, survey their lives that seem to them so sweet.