I was already a feminist when aged 20 I went to Somalia and Djibouti to conduct an environmental study as part of my science degree. I stayed 6 months in 2 installments over a year. 6 months that changed my life and made a huge mark on the young, somewhat naive woman I was.

Of course, for someone so young who had never travelled outside Europe, I can not deny that I found an exotic appeal to it. I loved smocking the Shisha with the mums, listening to the call to prayer drowned by the steet market noise at dusk, chewing Qat with the men,

Learning beautiful love songs in Amharic, Somali, Afar. It was like being in Henri de Monfreid and Kessel's books. At first anyway. But I wasn't a tourist. I was there to work, in a hospital, where I used the labs to grow bacteria & viruses I found in refuse waters.

That wasn't exotic. My study brought me to refugee camps: ppl were fleeing the civil war in Somalia. I met girls my age who dreamt of meeting Michael Jackson but their passport had been confiscated so they had to work, for free, for an aunt until they'll give them their IDs back.

It was slavery. I met children who had been mutilated by family members and made to beg on the streets. I met young prostitutes with babies on their backs. Over 98% of my female friends had suffered FGM, I learnt. Women, overall, were both exploited and dismissed.

I met women who had to leave everything they had to replace their deceased sister as their brother in law's new wife. How could the poor man cope without a maid and sex provider. I recognised this entitlement to women's labour, body and care, it wasn't just a Somali tradition.

Their condition angered me. I was 20 and ignorant but I didn't see the sex inequalities and the violence against women in that part of the world as something unique, or cultural, or "exotic". It resembled, albeit in a more extreme &overwhelming way, my own experience growing up.

In France, I knew rape wasn't punished, I knew I had to expect insults and intimidations simply for walking in the streets. My mother had told me my entire childhood that girls who don't work hard at school become prostitutes (go mum!), I knew women had gained the right to vote

And to an education only a couple of generations ago. I knew women were hated and exploited for their sex, in France and in Somalia. FGM was just an extreme, very concrete way of carving in the female body the hatred women face the world over.

I am not comparing my childhood to that of a Somali girl. I wouldn't dare. I was infinitely luckier and safer. But what I want to say, I guess, is that I gained from this experience the clear understanding that women are a people. We are a group with a common history,

multifaceted of course but following a common thread, we have similar collective trauma that each culture somatises in its own way but that is always borne by the female body, we occupy the same dismissed, disregarded, sexualised, violated, subordinate place in society.

We are groomed into it since birth. We have a common culture &history. Women are a people. Men are not part of our people.
Including them, their experience and desires means we can not become conscious of our own, know who we are and find solidarity with the women of the world.