African womanhood and the burden of endurance

African womanhood is often explained through endurance and resilience. The African woman is paraded as a symbol of hardship and strength. Suffering has become the badge of honour. Sadly, that never benefits her.

Many African women spend years proving their worth and fighting to be seen through enduring situations and environments they never should have to, only to be ‘rewarded’ with crumbs in the end. Sometimes nothing.

To be an African woman is to be bestowed with the expectation to endure without complaining, right from birth. To exist without visibility. To endure quietly without desire or agency.

Being an African woman in a heavily patriarchal environment means often silencing yourself to be palatable, or risk being called difficult when you take a stand. I believe the latter is more beneficial. Silence has never saved African women and it will not save us now.

Endurance in Love

We are taught to endure in love. To give and give and give, yet never expect anything in return. We are made to believe that endurance and suffering qualifies us to be deserving of love. The quiet submissive woman whose entire existence is dependent on a man, even if it kills her.

Endurance in the Workplace

We are taught to endure even in the workspace. Silence within oppressive systems keeps you employed. The fangs of patriarchy extend there too. Ambitious and assertive women are relegated to errand girls, wings clipped, ambition thwarted. So they endure. Having a job feels safer than speaking up and risking unemployment. That is what they are taught.

The politics of respectability is ridiculous. It silences African women and forces us to exist as incomplete, because our wholeness offends the patriarchy. It offends the man-made systems designed to make us feel like we are less than.

Endurance in Healthcare

We are taught to endure even in places meant to offer healing. In healthcare spaces, we are treated as though our bodies are not fully human in their capacity to feel pain, as though we are built to withstand more. Our pain is dismissed as exaggerated, dramatic or less urgent.

The dangerous myth that African women have a higher pain threshold than others has done immense harm. Many have been left for too long in hospital corridors and maternity wards, their pain minimized or ignored. Even institutional systems have normalised African women’s pain.

Endurance is not consent and strength should not be a substitute for care. African women deserve better.

The Inheritance of Silence

We are taught to endure in families. African daughters inherit the silent grief of their mothers and the emptiness and unfulfilment of their grandmothers, women who endured because they could not break free from the shackles of patriarchal expectations.

Have you ever sat with your grandmother and asked her who she really is? Beneath what necessity forced her to become? Do you know the dreams she had beyond being a wife and a mother? The convictions she could never exercise because she was not allowed to.

Writing as Resistance

This is why I believe in the power of writing. I want my words to resonate with those deliberately silenced, those made to shrink because they were told their opinions do not matter. I want them to find their voice. To speak up and stop enduring burdens never meant for them.

For generations, African womanhood has been shrouded in suffering and endurance. I once came across a social media post of an African woman dragging a cart filled with 20 litre bottles of water and the caption read, “Mama Africa is strong, but why does she have to suffer so much?”

Suffering has become synonymous with African womanhood. To be considered a ‘good woman’, you must suffer, you must bear pain and tolerate disrespect from all angles.

I want my writing to reflect the desires of those who were not allowed to express them, those whose existence threatens patriarchal norms that demand erasure over visibility. Those who may never stand up for themselves out of fear or duty. They need to know that although they endure quietly, they are not invisible. Their pain does not go unnoticed. Their yearning for more is valid. That suffocating feeling is a sign that something must break free.

I hope one day African women are celebrated for who they are, not praised for how much pain they can endure without breaking. Silence will never be the saviour of African women, and we cannot keep perpetuating it.

If writing disrupts that silence and false sense of comfort, even in the smallest way, so be it. African womanhood should not be about survival, it should be about wholeness, visibility and agency. We have endured enough.