The Inheritance Of Betrayal And Self-Sabotage Among African Women Remains Their Sharpest Weapon And Cruelest Enemy
The Mt Kenya Times 
By: Midmark Onsongo
Worth Noting:
- Rhetorical questions unravel here, for who else perpetuates this cycle? Who whispers to daughters that their place is beneath a man? It is a tragedy of cyclical proportions, one that turns empowerment into empty rhetoric. We are forced to ask: Are they victims of a greater narrative or willing participants in the orchestrated silence?
- The African Women Leaders Network launched in 2017 with international applause, yet it remains a symbol of a deeper contradiction. While women stand poised at the gates of leadership, it is often other women who close those gates, whispering that ambition is unbecoming or that one must “know her place.” Hypocrisy masquerades as mentorship.
Beneath the vibrant banners of feminism fluttering across Africa lies a murky truth: women often become the architects of their own shackles. They lift nations on their backs yet bury their own voices in silence, complicit in the myths that bind them. These are not just words meant to rattle; they are the shadows of an inconvenient reality. On February 26, 2021, during the African Union’s adoption of the Common African Position on Gender Equality, it became apparent that though the continent’s agenda is outlined with grand gestures, systemic cracks remain, fed by women’s own inertia and misdirected loyalties.
In 2023, Africa still bleeds an annual 20% of its GDP due to the underutilization of women’s potential. It is not for lack of ability but the cold embrace of age-old conspiracies where women uphold patriarchal norms to survive in structures they were taught to obey. They sideline each other, endorsing harmful traditions, and sustaining cultures that silence them, rather than seeking solidarity. This, too, is the essence of the Maputo Protocol’s irony, which guarantees rights on paper that many women themselves do not dare to claim in practice. It is a paradox that mocks progress.
Yet, nothing is more deafening than the betrayal among themselves. In the political arena, women constitute a mere 24% of parliamentarians across Africa. Here is the bitter irony: those few women who climb the ladder often pull it up behind them. Power intoxicates, and some forget they are but the chosen few among the multitudes silenced at village meetings or barred from leadership due to gender-biased traditions. In South Sudan, Liberia, and elsewhere, women who have ascended to power sometimes perpetuate the same exclusionary practices they once lamented.
But what is more damning than the double-edged sword of self-destruction is the complicity in oppression’s maintenance. African women—mothers, sisters, aunties—stand at the heart of societies yet are the loudest custodians of female genital mutilation, bride price rituals, and early marriages. The whispers in rural Kenya or Mali do not echo change; they echo ancient bondage, passed down and perfected. Mothers become the gatekeepers of archaic customs, their hands tied to traditions that demand they lead their daughters to the knife or the altar before the girls can dream beyond it.
Rhetorical questions unravel here, for who else perpetuates this cycle? Who whispers to daughters that their place is beneath a man? It is a tragedy of cyclical proportions, one that turns empowerment into empty rhetoric. We are forced to ask: Are they victims of a greater narrative or willing participants in the orchestrated silence?
The African Women Leaders Network launched in 2017 with international applause, yet it remains a symbol of a deeper contradiction. While women stand poised at the gates of leadership, it is often other women who close those gates, whispering that ambition is unbecoming or that one must “know her place.” Hypocrisy masquerades as mentorship. The African Union champions gender equality through its Agenda 2063, yet how many of the initiatives reach the grassroots where the entrenched battles are fought daily between mothers and daughters?
Economic disparity exposes another chilling irony. Women in Africa bear the brunt of labor, especially in agriculture, yet their earnings and contributions are invisibly absorbed into the GDP without recognition. Their unpaid labor, child-rearing, and caregiving are romanticized rather than remunerated. This harsh reality is laced with both irony and injustice, as those women often perpetuate their own exclusion from economic progress by dismissing the idea of formalized equality.
Even when victories come, they are met with muted celebration. Consider Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, whose leadership in Liberia stood as a beacon. But she was not embraced by all women with open arms. Her rise was also met with criticism from those who believed a woman’s place was elsewhere—an internalized patriarchy wielded against their own.
And so we must peel back the layers of this twisted legacy. Enjambed between hope and history lies a bitter truth: the greatest war against African women is not waged solely by men. It is waged in the spaces where women fear to uplift each other. They have become their enemies’ allies and, more tragically, their own adversaries.
Africa cannot wait for its daughters to awaken. The awakening must happen now, driven by those who refuse to be complicit in their demise. To the mothers who perpetuate the silence, it is time to ask: If not now, then when? To the sisters who mock ambition, it is time to ask: If not you, then who? And to the women in power who neglect those beneath them, it is time to acknowledge that leadership is not privilege but responsibility.
The continent cannot thrive on the bones of those silenced by their own. Africa’s women must break this inherited betrayal and realize that the true enemy is not the man above but the hand below, reaching to pull them back into the abyss of complacency.
This article was scripted by;
MIDMARK ONSONGO, SGS
(Socio-Geographic Scholar)
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