Show Notes
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...
More from Women And Resistance
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...
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...
This episode features host Adesoji Iginla and co-host Aya Fubara Eneli in conversation with Delphine Tsogo, who reflects on a life shaped by colonial partition, forest-based community knowledge, nursing, politics, and women’s organising in Cameroon. She traces how each stage of her life informed her work for women, children, and public welfare. The conversation matters because Delphine does not separate personal biography from public policy - she shows how language, education, healthc...