Speech on the Peasant Women Day, 15th October, 2025.
Written by Leon Munala
Secretary of The Peasants and Peasant Organization
Delivered by Comrade Karimi Wa Kagendo
National Organising Secretary, Revolutionary Youth League
Comrades, sisters, and fellow workers!
Today, the representatives of global capital in their glass palace tells us to celebrate. The United Nations, that grand committee for managing the common affairs of the global bourgeoisie, has declared this day the “International Day of the Rural Woman.”
- They will speak of our “resilience.”
- They will praise our “vital role in the economy.”
- They will hand microphones to a few so-called “successful” women and
- They will distribute branded T-shirts, buckets, and packets of hybrid seeds.
But we say: No!
We will not be pacified with platitudes and trinkets.
We reject this celebration that masks our exploitation.
We are not here to be celebrated—we are here to be liberated.
Let us examine the reality of the rural woman in Kenya—not through the rose-tinted glasses of the UN, but through the sharp, scientific lens of class analysis.
We are the backbone of this nation, yet we are the most crushed by its weight. We till the land. We plant the seeds, we harvest the tea, the coffee, the flowers that earn billions in foreign exchange.
But where does this wealth go?
It does not remain in our blistered hands. It flows into the coffers of multinational corporations - plantation owners, export companies, agrochemical cartels.
It lines the pockets of the local comprador bourgeoisie - landlords, corrupt politicians, and middlemen who grow fat off our sweat.
Systemic Exploitation
This is no accident. It is the very logic of capitalism.
We are not merely “rural women.” We are the proletariat of the countryside.
Our hands are the means of production.
Our labor is the commodity ruthlessly exploited.
They speak of “empowerment” which means;
Loans from microfinance institutions that enslave us with 30% interest, being integrated into global supply chains that dictate the price of our sweat.
Being told to be “entrepreneurs” on half-acre plots of barren land while vast fertile tracts are owned by absentee landlords, churches, corrupt politicians, and foreign agribusiness.
They speak of “land rights” while daughters of Mau Mau freedom fighters remain landless.
While community land is grabbed, titled, and sold to the highest bidder.
The legacy of colonialism - the concentration of land in the hands of a few - has not been broken. It has been perfected by the neo-colonial Kenyan state.
Who bears the triple burden of this exploitation?
As workers, our labor is super-exploited and paid in pennies—not paid at all.
As women, patriarchy ensures we do all the unpaid domestic labor—fetching water, gathering firewood, cooking, caring for children and elders—on top of our fieldwork.
As peasants, we are perpetually indebted, at the mercy of erratic markets and climate disasters we did not create.
Even “World Food Day” is a mockery—where the rich feast while the poor languish in poverty.
False Solutions
The UN and its NGO partners offer “training” and “sensitization” teaching us how to better cope with our oppression while we do not need to learn how to bear our chains. We need to learn how to break them!
Call to Action
So, what is to be done, comrades?
First, we must recognize: Our struggle is not isolated.
The struggle of the rural woman is inseparable from that of the landless peasant, the unemployed youth in Mathare, and the exploited worker in the EPZ.
Our enemy is the same: The capitalist class and its state apparatus.
Second, we must reject the harmless “women’s groups” used to distribute donor funds and sow division.
We must organize into militant, class-conscious unions and cooperatives, form alliances with the urban working class.
Our power lies not in begging for rights from the county governor, but in our collective strength:
The power to withhold labor, to occupy land that is rightfully ours and to block the roads that carry our produce to the exploiters.
Third, we must fight for a revolutionary alternative - Not “inclusion” in a system designed to exclude us - But the overthrow of that system.
Down with the blood-soaked government!
Down with the big landowners!
We demand:
- Nationalization of all large-scale farms and plantations under workers’ and peasants’ control
- Genuine land reform—redistributing land freely to those who work it
- Cancellation of all odious debts to microfinance institutions and banks
- Free, collective childcare and socialised domestic labor to liberate women from the double burden
- Collectivisation of agriculture to serve human need—not profit
Comrades,
They call us “resilient” because we have survived their exploitation but we are more than survivors.
We are the grave-diggers of this rotten system from the slopes of Mount Kenya to the shores of Lake Victoria, from the arid plains of the North to the coast.
We will unite to show them:
We are not “resilient” We are the destroyers of patriarchal norms and their mother—capitalism.
Let us turn their day of empty celebration into a day of revolutionary resolve.
Let us build a Kenya where the rural woman is not a beast of burden but a free and equal architect of a socialist society.
A society where the wealth we create is owned and controlled by us, the producers.
The emancipation of the rural woman is the emancipation of all the oppressed.
Aluta Continua!
Komboa Wamama Mashambani!
Long Live the CPM-K Vanguard!
More Power to the Peasants!
Liberate the Rural Woman!