Straw, Sisterhood and Systems, Decoding the Invisible Labour of African Women

This past weekend, the internet buzzed with conversation around Straw, a film that, though deceptively simple in form, cuts deep into the marrow of what it means to be a woman navigating the suffocating intersections of race, gender and poverty. As the credits rolled, I sat in silence, tears caught somewhere between my throat and chest. Not from pity, but from a sharp recognition, of self, of my grandmother, of my daughter, of all the women whose labour sustains a world that refuses to see them.

Like Unseen, Hidden Figures, Six Triple Eight and The Handmaid’s Tale, Straw doesn’t merely narrate a story; it unveils a system. These works don’t seek sympathy. They demand scrutiny, of the systems we inherited, the traumas we normalised and the stories that were always ours to tell.

The Anatomy of Straw: What Lies Beneath the Surface

At face value, Straw appears to be about an ordinary woman in an ordinary home, dealing with ordinary struggles. But it is precisely this ordinariness that is radical. The straw she carries is metaphorical, the relentless accumulation of micro and macro aggressions, domestic expectations, inherited trauma, cultural obligations, economic hardship and emotional invisibility. Every silent sigh, every quiet act of endurance, is another straw added to her load.

The film’s title nods, of course, to the idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” But this is not a story of a woman breaking, it is a story of what precedes the break: the weight, the silence, the normalised expectations of sacrifice.

Subliminally, Straw deconstructs the very foundation of societal functioning: unpaid, invisible labour, the kind that African women have always given and rarely been credited for. According to UN Women (2021), women perform over three times the amount of unpaid care and domestic work as men. In African contexts, this work is not only unrecognised but also expected as a cultural norm, rendering women both indispensable and invisible.

Poverty Beyond the Pocket

Let us be clear: the poverty we speak of here is not just economic. It is multidimensional, spanning education, mental health, spirituality and communal infrastructure. Trauma bonding becomes the only accessible form of community. Faith is weaponised as endurance and endurance becomes identity.

When I reflect on the character of Jenniyah in Straw, I don’t see fiction. I see the continuum of women. I am reminded of a movie I watched when I was younger of a grandmother, who, during apartheid, worked as a domestic worker for a white family while raising seven children of her own. Not by choice, but by the design of a system that demanded her womb build a lineage not for her but for her husband’s name, while her labour-built comfort for her employers. Her moments of “rest” were merely shifts between sites of servitude from the white household to her own, where love was still labour.

This is the historical scaffolding upon which our current realities are built.

Dismantling the Myth of the Strong Black Woman

Popular culture often reveres African women for their strength. But strength, in this context, has become a euphemism for tolerating the intolerable. It is not resilience we should glorify but the conditions that necessitate it that we must interrogate.

To decode Straw is to confront the violence of that glorification. The protagonist is not asking to be saved, she is asking to be seen and, in the film’s, most powerful moment, when other women finally recognise her burden as their own, something shifts. The system begins to wobble.

This is the unwritten law of collective awakening: when women rise together, systems collapse. 

Films like Straw are not victories in themselves. They are starting points, acts of narrative reclamation that challenge the monolithic, Western-dominated lens through which African women have historically been viewed and they are proof that the stories that shape public consciousness must come from those who live them.

So how do we honour these stories with dignity, recognising where we come from, without being swallowed by the grief of it?

We begin by understanding that telling the truth is itself a radical act of healing. We honour by naming the roots and tracing the branches, by acknowledging the pain but also mapping the progress. Every generation of African women has broken a barrier so the next could stand taller. The matriarchs didn’t just endure; they invested and the return on their sacrifice is our voice, our visibility and our vision. This is the past we chronicle, the present we navigate and the future we shape. Not through someone else’s lens, but through our own.

We are not the straw that breaks. We are the roots that rise.

By Hazel Namponya| Chief Storyteller Maua Bio Magazine