This is a story of survival…

This is a story of survival…

It was a typical day in my village…

 At the break of dawn, I and my siblings had to wake up and tend to the fields and fetch water from the river. I wasn’t particularly fond of the fields it was hot and humid and I hated the river the most it was filled to the brim with crocodiles and other dangerous animals of the wild, with the sun beating down on my already scorched back. But what we were most afraid of were the pale men that look like the cassava powder we pound every day. We were afraid of them because they seemed like aliens from another world. They always came to our village collecting food and our men. My father told it’s nothing that concerns a woman and I didn’t question it out of respect.

On this day though something was off, rumors were spreading that the war was getting closer and closer to our village and the men that rebelled against the government were taking away girls and little boys in order to fill their ranks. I was not scared after all they said they only went for beautiful girls. I was not beautiful, my mother told me so on countless occasions. Even the men in my village always went for my sisters and never even looked in my direction. I wasn’t worried though, I had the strength of a man and a sharp tongue, I was proud of it. I am my father’s daughter after all.

While his sons were either on the side of the powdered men and the rebels. I became the son he wished he had by his side… it seems sad but I loved it. Anything to keep me out of those godforsaken fields and into the shady shack that is my father’s workshop that created the most basic of furniture. Today I was not so lucky because we needed extra hands on the field due to my sister being sick. I was weeding when the first shot rang out then multiple were heard with men howling, shouting and making war cries. They were merely passing by probably on their way to war again. Young boys from 10 upwards, were equipped with katanas and machine guns howling and doing sexual gestures towards the girls on the field.

 It didn’t seem like their purpose was women because they kept driving on. I didn’t bother looking up from my weeding. I stood up and cracked by back in place and I noticed a car stopped abruptly and a man climbed out. He was beautiful, skin a dark nutmeg, sunglasses covering his eyes. His attire completely militant. He looked around the field and started trampling like a giant through the field. I was getting irritated that he was ruining a good harvest. My eyes narrowed further when he stopped a foot away from me and proceeded to piss on my basket of corn. I knew it was suicide to do something so I just kept my eyes narrowed.

By now everyone was huddled together and slowly inching away from him. I stood my ground though.  I wasn’t going to be intimidated by someone that threatened our livelihood for his piss break. He looked up directly at me. His eyebrow arched as he looked directly at me. That was when I knew I was in trouble.  Fear crept in slowly and I looked towards my mother who was already running towards me. Shouting out my name, I knew and she knew I have caught his interest. I looked towards her again and I mouthed a goodbye. Suddenly I was jerked forward and he told me I would do nicely. And he shouted at his men to take ten of their pick and to leave the rest. It was chaos, girls started screaming and struggling all of them running into the jungle to try and get away from the rebels. I didn’t bother fighting him but I knew I wouldn’t make it easy for him to break him. My mother was too old to take but she begged for my release. She knew my father won’t be able to handle another child being taken whether it is the powdered men or these rebels. Was the no difference between them? Both were men both were savages when taking women for their pleasures…but I was A WOMAN, I will not submit to these oppressors. Whether it be our own brothers, fathers, uncles, and husbands that vowed to protect us that

are now doing to us what the powdered men have been doing to us for years…

 My name is Magdalena

This is based on a true story on account of a Congolese woman.

TENDER

At sixteen, I stopped feeling ashamed of desiring women but dealing with a public queer identity—navigating a world that told me if I wasn’t invisible I wasn’t wanted—stressed me.

 Then and now, I loved media written by or about women—safe havens for the femme self I was shamed into hiding. I felt kinship with women whose inner lives were ignored or denigrated. H. D.’s book Sea Garden was one such work. 

Because my queerness was private and hypothetical (I hadn’t so much as kissed a girl at the time) my sexuality was profoundly interior. Sea Garden reminded me of Cape Town, the patch of beach where I listened to Mariah Carey and imagined a life without worry. Unafraid of traditionally feminine images—flowers, the sea—H. D. inspired me with her luscious and acrid, florid and bitter, god-haunted landscapes—erotic, psychological, and spiritual. 

In H. D.’s poem “Orchard,” the prostrate speaker entreats a god’s absent son to spare him from loveliness. Isn’t this an endlessly queer dilemma—to love and loathe one’s desire?

 I knew those rituals from my own fantasies beckoning some big, god of a woman to have her way with my body, yet stay, stay tender, leave me—so that I may call her again—loved, sore, alive.

 by Keletso Modiba

Centering our Narratives and diaspora : A BLACK PANTHER STORY

By Zainub Bhayet

We must dare to invent the future – Thomas Sankara.

“There shouldn’t be only one definition of development. Our cities and societies don’t all ohave to look one way to be considered developed.” –Afropolitan Central

Along most of the West African coast, the palm trees that studded the shoreline quickly gave way to a dense tropical rain forest. The only place along the coast where open grasslands replaced the rain forest was the ‘Gap of Berlin’ in which the Dahomey Kingdom took shape. It was during the 18th and 19th centuries, until the colonization of the French.

The fon people of Africa established the Dahomey Kingdom. The Dahomey Amazons were women worriers, a military group that once protected the kingdom of Dahomey, of whom resided in Benin. They were called TheN’nonmiton.

Due to slave trade at that time and the wars which became imminent, the Dahomey Kingdom started to lose more and more or their men. This was the beginning of the recruitment of women to fight. These women turned out to be the most fierce and impressive women worriers in history.

The king, Dahomey kingdom and other foreign kingdoms remained under a  FEMALE militant group. The kingdom lasted for 300 years before it was abolished by the French who annexed the Dahomey’s Amazon territory into a colonial empire.

The Dahomey Worrier Women were respected and feared by the Dahomey men as well as their enemies. They were superior to their male counterparts; they were given power in public life and mainly in its full time professional army.  For instance, they were known to never retreat from battle while male worriers were punished for doing so more than once. It was considered immoral to fire an arrow at women. Women were also known to take risky collective action against what they perceived as political oppression. In 1929, before the colonial conquest, remarkably the women’s political and economic power equaled the power of men  which was part of the post-colonial era. Under the Dahomey kingdom, men feared women because women had the power to take action against them. Women had their very own women’s council.

There are five classifications of regiments within the group, named after the weapon or purpose of the women. 1) Huntress: They were the gunners. 2) Riflewomen: They accounted for the largest part of the worriers. 3) Reapers: These women were feared by their enemies. 4) Archers: Most impressive steady-handed young women. 5) Gunners: The sound of their guns were used as an intimidation strategy.

The Dahomey women fiercely would chant: Lionesses are more fearsome than lions, because she has her cubs to defend, And we the Amazons, have you to defend. The king, our king and our God, ki-ni. And other times, the women worriers would show their feminine traits by dressing in elegant silk, velvet, and chintz, their breasts daubed with pale green pomade and would dance for hours.

It was when the European colonial governments interceded that European beliefs imposed African practices. These embedded Eurocentric ideas seem to continue to  linger on and haunt us during our post-colonial era. French officials had a common practice for women and for the place of women in public life, and that was the opposite of the Dahomean’ practices. They marginalized women through depicting the perfect women confining them to be mothers and housewives and not to hold high political office, nether to influence the affairs of government.

In the final years of Dahomey’s Kingdom, the Dahomey women suspected a colonial government would inflict economic hardships on them. They banded together to attack chiefs appointed by the colonialist. After long gruesome fights that they put up against with the colonizer, they were abolished.

The memory and legacy of these women need to be lived on in Africa, as they depicted a modern world without the intervention of European ideologies. They were known for their exceptional work, their impressive use of weapons and strength. Post-colonial Africa needs to carry the legacy of these devoted, powerful cutthroat women worriers through abandoning the colonial indoctrination and measurement against western ideologies of what a women should be like. There is a need in nations and groups which have been victims of imperialism to achieve an identity uncontaminated by Universalist or Eurocentric concepts or images.

We can remember these genocides for black and indigenous people through the lens of post-colonialism. Contemporary depictions of blackness should not be affected by history nor should history be used as a weapon against the West. Rather Afrofuturism and people of African descent should be looking at themselves in the future and what their society and their culture will look like years from now.

Technology combined with tradition should be the way of pulling real African culture into media spaces, expressed through a balanced gender. Budgets and production surrounding Africa should be made under the influence of ancient Africa

The Dahomey was dated back to the 11th century being the oldest city in West Africa and the most advanced. African societies were developed alongside nature as opposed to destroying it. The people of Benin had an advanced form of math that Europeans haven’t even comprehended.

They had street lamps powered by palm oil; it was the first city to have electricity. It was a wealthy and complex society. Also it was very safe unlike Europe at that time. There was much more moral maturity as a society. They had complex art made of ivory. Africa is very primitive. Arica has a rich history! The people of Africa do not need fiction to empower them but just the notion of a black secret technology which allows Afrofuturism to reach a point of speculative acceleration.

Dahomey–renamed Benin in 1975–showing its location in West Africa

References

Edgerton RB, Worrior women, The amazons of dahomey and the nature of war, westview press, 2000, pg 1221-157

Afropolitan Central, Episdoe 1-Black Panther and reflections on African Development, soundcloud https://m.soundcloud.com/afropolitancentral/ep2-black-panther-and-reflections-on-african-development

Francaise, A,Women Worriers: A Dahomey Story, 19 December 2017 http://learnfrenchchicago.com/2017/12/women-warriors-dahomey-story/