One of the questions I am most frequently asked is “what is African feminism and how is it different from western feminism”. It is a valid question that points to the clarity that people seek in the process of self discovery, which is what becoming feminist is. But the response that I’ve been giving over…
Sex for women and men
sex for women: two days before date with lover-to-be: skip breakfast. remove all evidence of hair on legs, armpits, labia, around anus, inside nose, moustache, toes, arms; wherever there’s a follicle, uproot its produce. with the exception of the follicles on your head of course. those follicles are okay, massage them, oil them, style their produce. go to…
A post-444 analysis of Lemonade
In a critical review of Lemonade in 2016, bell hooks wrote, “Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators daringly offer multidimensional images of black female life, much of the album stays within a conventional stereotypical framework, where the black woman is always a victim.” It was reassuring to read hooks’s take on Lemonade in “Moving Beyond…
A feminist analysis of masculinity in J Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only
In 1985, the same year that the artist J Cole was born, feminism was on the other hand, dying. The radical change in sexual roles that had marked feminism in the 1970s was replaced by a rapprochement of traditional relations through the early 1980s. Rather than challenging gender norms, women were returning to girlishness and men to machoism….
Becoming Wild Women
I was sitting behind a group of girls on a double decker London bus. They were behaving typically of their age (fifteen, or so): honking like a flock of geese, talking over each other, endearingly addressing one another ‘cunt’, ‘bitch’, talking about boys or rather about “the” boy they all secretly seemed to lust for…
Tradition is the key challenge for African feminists in the 21st century
In the 1960s, an anticolonial political and military group in Angola, the MPLA (Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola), began an intensive guerrilla warfare campaign against the Portuguese. The MPLA were a determined army whose efforts forced Portuguese resettlement. The MPLA was also a dual gender army. And with both men and women fighting…
The challenge for western feminism in the 21st century
Feminism in the west is failing. For one, the west has seen the smallest changes in closing the leadership gender gap. Latin America has fared best in this matter, but also voters in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Caribbean have done better at electing women presidents and prime ministers. Western women are not only being side stepped…
In which even the university of Cambridge admits that ancient Egypt was Black African
In 2006, the Cambridge University art and antiquities museum, Fitzwilliam, did a commendable thing when they, following a £1.5 million renewal project, launched their new Egypt galleries. The idea was to showcase ancient Egyptian religion, magic, writing, ritual and to redisplay the collections in a contemporary and dynamic way. But that was not all. In a rare condemnation…
32 views on Afropolitanism
Last month, I took part in a panel discussion about Afroisms at Busseywood film festival. The panel, moderated by Tega Okiti, consisted of Emma Dabiri and Chardine Taylor-Smith, both opponents of Afropolitanism, and myself – a proponent of it. When I chose the name for my blog, I didn’t intuit becoming a proponent of Afropolitanism. The term…
Repowerment rather than empowerment
I’m getting impatient with the idea that the reason we should empower African women is to lift African economies, as UN under-secretary-general and executive director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, argued in The Sowetan on Sunday. I’m not fed up with this proposition because economic growth isn’t important for African countries (although I do think…
Frida Kahlo’s few little pricks exposes male violence
It is shocking how common stabbing to death by men is a cause of death for women. In the past month alone a 21 year old, Laura Davies, was stabbed to death by her boyfriend near a pony sanctuary in Essex. Another British woman, Jennifer Williams, 25, was stabbed to death by her partner too….
Regarding pornography
It’s time for women to radically change our views about pornography. By radically change our views, I mean views both as in watch more porn and views as in attitudes. Statistics suggest that half of all women with access watch porn, but there’s still a veil of shame to it. Why? After all, most people, male or female,…
Islamophobia in Europe and in Africa should not be conflated
Fifteen years ago, before 9/11, hardly anyone used the term ‘Islamophobia’. Today, the term is used all the time, especially by liberals, but rarely with an accompanying reflection of its corresponding relationship to the ongoing “war against terror”. Islamophobia is discussed as though it appeared out of nowhere. And not, as it were, as a term that firmly…
The paintings of Manuela Sambo
Manuela Sambo’s art makes me feel the same way that Yvonne Vera’s novels do. Her pieces make me (longingly) identify with a kind of primal power that women possess but, following centuries of brainwashing, that we are unaccustomed with. Like Vera’s, Sambo’s work seems to be in search of a world of poetic essence, caring deeply…
The problem with philosophy
Across the country, students have been “dismantling the master’s house”. They weren’t smashing their principals’ offices, but rather demanding a revision of their predominantly white, predominantly male curricula. From UCL to LSE to York, Warwick, Nottingham and Kent, the student-led campaign “Why Is My Curriculum White?” has attracted thousands of people concerned that the…
7 ways that women are oppressed without knowing it
I will live but that is all that I will do for patriarchy, is my conscientious feminist motto. It is not always an easy task for women, however, because society constantly tries to diminish feminist consciousness by encouraging women to redefine rather than, remove, oppression. For instance, rather than embolden legal action against rape, women are encouraged to…