By Naushad Baloch
Every colonized people learns the same lesson eventually. Freedom is never distributed equally. Not even among the oppressed. I have grown up watching this truth unfold in Balochistan, where the fight for freedom is ongoing and where women are no longer waiting on the sidelines. They are marching. Organizing. Leading. And yet, somehow, even here the same old argument returns. That their role should be secondary. That the real fight comes first.
Mozambican revolutionary leader Samora Machel saw this exact pattern nearly half a century ago in Mozambique’s war against Portuguese colonial rule. During the liberation war, Machel organized a conference for Mozambican women engaged across all sectors of the revolution. But several voices, including fellow comrades, argued that the priority must remain fighting the Portuguese colonizers first. Women’s emancipation could follow after independence was secured.
Machel didn’t just call this thinking wrong. He called it dangerous. He warned that a revolution that sidelines half its people cannot claim to be liberating anyone at all. He pointed to Mozambique’s own struggle as proof. A revolution that stops halfway never really gets rid of oppression. It just hides for a while and comes back. As he said, “The liberation of women is not an act of charity. It is not the result of a humanitarian or compassionate position. It is a fundamental necessity for the Revolution, a guarantee of its continuity, and a condition for its success.”
This wasn’t unique to Mozambique. The same argument would resurface in different words wherever women organized inside anticolonial movements. From Cairo to Algeria to Maputo.
But what does liberation actually mean? It’s not mechanical equality. It isn’t women copying men by doing the same jobs or collecting the same degrees as a status symbol. That’s a surface level idea that completely misses the point.
Real emancipation happens on several levels at once. Politically, it means building consciousness, not just reacting to events. Reaction without political clarity is just noise. During Cuba’s independence war, women like Celia carried the movement’s message as much as its supplies. Spreading propaganda. Holding the ideological line. Proving participation was never only physical labor. It was political labor too. Women had to understand their exclusion as a structural problem of power, not bad luck. And they had to take part in actual decision making instead of being spoken for by elites.
Economically, it means control, not just labor. Celia’s own role in the resistance shows this clearly. Running supply lines. Keeping guerrilla fighters fed and treated. Holding together the everyday machinery that let the war continue. This wasn’t support work on the side. This was the war.
Culturally and scientifically, it means breaking ignorance on purpose. Keeping women away from education was never an accident. It was a strategy. Because an uneducated woman can’t write her own history. Can’t name her own oppression. Can’t organize against something she was never taught to see. Colonial power didn’t just occupy land. It occupied minds. And it occupied women’s minds first. Knowledge was the one weapon it could never fully take away. That’s exactly why every liberation movement that took women seriously also handed them books, not just guns.
Obscurantism was always where this started. Superstition and religious beliefs found their most fertile ground among women precisely because they were kept submerged in ignorance. A kind of ignorance was maintained deliberately, discouraging critical thought and questioning, and slowly wearing down both their confidence and their chances of achieving their own emancipation.
And this wasn’t only a colonial invention. Even in Europe, women were dismissed as creatures with long hair and short ideas. Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the most celebrated philosophers of his age, wrote that woman is by nature meant to obey. For centuries, philosophers called women weak, emotional, and naturally inferior. And history proved them wrong again and again.
Baloch history did not lack women who led. Banadi Baloch commanded a war against Sher Shah Suri’s forces back in 1555. Sammi waged her own war for justice with her wealth and her own hands. Gul Bibi led resistance against General Dyer’s British forces in 1916, fighting colonialism while it was still happening, not after. These weren’t exceptions. They were proof of what Baloch women had always been capable of.
Then colonial rule brought a new architecture of control with it. Colonial administration formalized and hardened domestic ideology across the region, pushing purdah and seclusion as markers of respectability, a woman’s worth measured by how invisible she stayed in public life. Leadership shrank into four walls. War became sewing. Command became silence.
It’s the same theft Machel named in Mozambique. The same erasure Algeria’s women lived through. Balochistan was never an exception to this pattern. It was always part of it. And today, when Baloch women march again, organize again, and lead again, breaking patriarchal chains, they aren’t asking for something new. They’re taking back what was always theirs.
This truth hit home profoundly on 26 April 2022. When shari baloch a highly educated MSc and MPhil degree holder a mother of two sweet children carried out a suicide attack outside Karachi University targeting Chinese Communist Party members. Her sacrifice was not an isolated incident. Rather it ignited a revolution as a new wave of women joined the movement in large numbers. From 20 years old zareena rafique to 60 years old hatam naz and many others in between women from all walks of life answered the call.
In Baloch movement Women are no longer confined to acts of suicide alone. They have also stepped onto the battlefield, taking up arms alongside men. Hawa Baloch alias Droushoum, who participated in Operation Herof and fought at the Gwadar camp. She continued fighting until her very last bullet. In the end, following the philosophy of the “last bullet,” she used her final bullet on herself rather than surrendering.
More recently a video emerged showing a female commander leading Fateh Squad after the fidayeen of the Majeed Brigade completed his target targeting coast card camp. This visual evidence proves what we’ve known all along women are not just participants but leaders in command positions within the resistance.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Balochistan Post or any of its editors.