Micheline Ravololonarisoa

Ravololonarisoa was FAEM's general secretary in 1972, yet inside its leadership women were pressed to act as "their secretary" typing, duplicating and distributing documents, and were treated at times as the accredited girlfriends of male cadres. The division in which women came from the social science and law faculties while the men came from economics, medicine and the sciences hardened that hierarchy. As one of four women on a bureau of around fifteen men, she refused to accept being "part of the furniture" and took on the task of mobilising teachers, church leaders, civil servants and trade unions, at the cost of mockery and humiliation in which they were told they were "hens pretending to crow but just making squeaking noises." She calls this "the beginning of my revolt against patriarchy." Finding the same exclusion later among peasant organisations, trade unions and government institutions, she concluded that anger and revolt alone did not produce change and could be destructive, and turned instead to well-researched argument. Travelling across African countries as a WSCF programme officer, she saw how similar women's conditions were and settled on women organising to define their own vision and objectives. Later, as Chief of UNIFEM's Africa section overseeing policy and programmes across four African sub-regions, she described the UN as "a huge bureaucratic outfit" with layers of power in which "he/she who pays the piper called the tune." She noted that women's issues are not part of states' "hard" politics and that eurocentric narratives on Africa made negotiation an uphill battle, while defining her own role as that of "a catalyst," not the source of the change. For her, feminism is an ideology, an analytical and strategic framework and a guide to daily practice that works to transform power relations, especially gender power relations, and that leads to the fair, equal and just society advocated by socialism.