Show Notes
What does it mean to resist when the whole world has decided your body is a spectacle? In this episode Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. and Adesoji Iginla sit with one of the most shattering stories in the long history of Black women’s resistance: the life of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from the Eastern Cape of South Africa, who was taken to Europe in 1810, exhibited as a freak show attraction under the racist name “Hottentot Venus,” and whose remains were not returned to her hom...
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Adesoji Iginla and Aya Fubara Eneli trace the life of Yelena Kanga, the Black Russian journalist, television presenter, and author whose family story spans Mississippi, Moscow, Zanzibar, and Uzbekistan. The episode explores resistance not only as protest but also as land ownership, education, survival, storytelling, and refusal of the roles history assigns you. Aya frames Yelena’s life as part of a larger generational struggle, while Adesoji guides the conversation through the h...
In this episode of Women and Resistance, Adesoji Iginla and Aya Fubara Eneli spotlight the extraordinary life of Valaida Snow, a Black woman performer who used music, performance, travel, and self-reinvention as acts of survival and refusal. Valaida shares how talent, education, and style became tools for resisting racism, sexism, and erasure across the United States, Europe, and Asia. We discuss her childhood in a travelling performance family, her mastery of multiple instruments, he...
In this episode of Women and Resistance, Adesoji Iginla and Aya Fubara Eneli center the life of Rosa Maria Castellanos Castellanos, also known as La Bayamesa, a formerly enslaved Cuban healer, field surgeon, hospital founder, and captain in the Cuban Liberation Army. Her story becomes a larger meditation on freedom, women’s labour in war, and how historical memory erases Black women’s leadership. The conversation moves through slavery, the Ten Years’ War, improvised battlefield medici...
This episode profiles Luisa Diaz Diogo, Mozambique’s first woman Minister of Planning and Finance and first woman Prime Minister, in a wide-ranging conversation about nation-building under colonialism, war, structural adjustment, and recovery. She explains why economics is inseparable from liberation, and why peace must be funded, coordinated, and protected. The conversation also connects her personal life to national history, from being born in a rice field in colonial Tete to raising ...
This episode centers on Cecile Fatiman, the Haitian mambo whose role in the Bois Caïman uprising helped ignite the Haitian Revolution. Adesoji Iginla and Aya as Cecile Fatiman use storytelling, history, and spiritual teaching to show how resistance lives in memory, ritual, ancestry, and joy. We discuss how colonial power tried to erase African spiritual knowledge, why Vodou is a structured faith rather than a horror-story stereotype, and how liberation requires both strategy and spiritual g...