Leadership Quote by Thomas Sankara

"I can hear the roar of women's silence" lands like a paradox meant to embarrass the listener into attention. Sankara takes what power prefers women to be - quiet, compliant, offstage - and reframes it as deafening evidence of structural violence. Silence here isn't consent or serenity; it's a pressure chamber. The "roar" is the collective weight of what has been swallowed: unpaid labor, coerced deference, political exclusion, routine harassment, the daily arithmetic of risk. By claiming he can hear it, Sankara also indicts everyone who conveniently cannot.

The line is rhetorically clever because it turns absence into presence. It treats muteness as data, not mystery, and suggests that the real scandal isn't that women are quiet; it's that institutions have engineered the conditions where speaking carries a cost. That cost can be literal - punishment, social expulsion - or bureaucratic, where women's needs are translated into "secondary issues" and filed away.

Context matters: Sankara led Burkina Faso's revolutionary government in the 1980s, pushing anti-imperialist reforms while publicly insisting that women's liberation was not a side project but a prerequisite for genuine social transformation. The quote performs that politics. It's a warning to male revolutionaries who want the optics of progress without the upheaval of patriarchy. If you can "hear" the roar, you're obligated to respond, not with praise or pity, but with power redistributed: laws, education, reproductive autonomy, and the unglamorous work of changing who gets to speak and be believed.