mbuya nehanda’s risen bones  ⚱️

I went to see her receive her honorary doctorate at my university last year: when I asked her how Black feminisms informed her politics: she flipped the question around and asked me what where “Black feminisms?” in an auditorium full of white people.

She knew exactly where I was taking the question but decided it was the right time to question the historical inception of Black feminisms because she didn’t want me to critic her politics.

I then decided give her simplest definition and then proceeded to ask her how she didn’t know anything about it when she a) went to college in America b) wrote a whole essay on feminism

She told me that her “feminism” was African and needed to be liberated from the academic world that pits “feminisms” against each other.

She told me that her goal was to make feminism accessible by globalizing it in a language that everyone can understand. She insisted that she was not an activist but merely a christian women writer who’s goal is to give her women characters nuance

& that for her that came down to her feminist praxis. Basically took 20 minutes(talking in circles) to answer a straight forward question because she didn’t want to tarnish her imagery as an African feminist heroine in the eyes of White academia.

Chimamanda is a progressive neo-liberal who practices representation politics. She has no desire to be accountable to any communities because she is in community with the elite so people who can mutually exalt her positionality in society.

She has the desire + privilege to practice and perform respectable African womanhood which entails being a gatekeeper for Patriarchal bourgeois feminity. Her brand is a moralizing project that reflects how much she is dire to preserve a culture of individualistic power pursuits

which means that Chimamanda will always practice exclusionary politics: she has the power to evade accountability because she knows that her demographic is multi-racial and she knows who can help her secure that bag: white people. She’s pandering to that demographic