Resurrecting our Afrikan Foremuthas
by Nnennaya Amuchie, Esq., LSPC Supervising Attorney
The 1929 Aba Women’s War is one of the largest women-led resistance movements against European imperialism. In 1928, rumors spread throughout southeastern Nigeria that the British would begin counting and imposing taxes on women to fund World War I. To these women, census counting and taxation evoked the horrors of chattel slavery, where millions of their loved ones had been trafficked across the ocean. News spread like wildfire throughout the region leading thousands of Igbo, Ibibio, Ogoni, Efik, Urhobo, Igala, Annang, Andoni, Ijaw, Ikwerre, Idoma, Ekoi, Owasi, Iduwa, Itigidi, and Edo women to organize protests outside of jails, prisons, courthouses, factories, colonial homes and buildings that undermined their sovereignty. These women quickly mobilized across multiple nations using their ancient market communication channels. Connected through the ancestral power of the land and water, they understood that an attack on one village was an attack on all. As such, they evoked the powerful African practice of baring their chest to call on the earth and evoke the names of their ancestral mothers for spiritual protection and justice. With the power of their ancestors, these African women physically liberated their incarcerated sisters from colonial cages, many of whom were criminalized for practicing their traditional spirituality and religion.
In May 2015, calling back to this ancient African practice, Black queer and trans women and other Black marginalized gendered folks showed their bare chest in the San Francisco financial district. This protest drew the connections between African spiritual warfare, the economic exploitation and mass displacement of Black people in San Francisco, and the specific police violence and genocide of Black women and girls. This protest was part of the national #SayHerName movement to highlight and organize around the specific ways Black women, girls, and other gender marginalized folks experience police violence.
In 1781, an enslaved African woman named Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett) liberated herself and other enslaved Africans through the courts by writing herself into the Massachusetts Constitution. In Brom and Bett v. John Ashley, she challenged the institution of chattel slavery and asserted that it was illegal for John Ashley to enslave her under the Massachusetts constitution. The Massachusetts constitution claimed, “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.” The jury supported Mum Bett’s argument which set her and co-plaintiff Brom free, ordering John Ashley to pay thirty shillings in damages plus trial costs. In the African tradition of naming oneself as a practice of freedom, Elizabeth took on the name Freeman like many liberated Black folks in the Americas. According to the Massachusetts Historical Society, Freeman was a midwife and healer who continued to defend enslaved and free Africans. Mum Bett became the second wealthiest Black landowner in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and left an estate that included 19 acres of land, furniture, jewelry, and fine clothing.
Freemans’s act of naming herself is indicative of the importance of respecting the name, autonomy, and gender self-determination of Black transgender folks globally. The naming ceremony. To name oneself. To be rooted and connected to a life force that instilled in you a unique and dynamic destiny, obligation, responsibility, trust, and wisdom. To call a person out their name has always been a tool of violence & social/political control. It is un-African. It lives within the legacies of anti-Blackness, chattel slavery, homophobia, ableism and transphobia. To misname or misgender someone is to void all social, familial & contracts with them; it is to attempt genocide, to cut them off from that which sprouted them up, the earth. To misgender or misname someone is to disrespect dirt. To disrespect dirt is to disrespect Blackness is to disrespect Africa, that which is the source of all creation.
When Africans arrived in one part of Turtle Island, they could not grow or find yams; but they found potatoes. They found what felt like home, what kept them closer to their roots. They practiced that wisdom and knowledge when they named sweet potato “yams”, a naming ceremony to call back and remember Afrika, honoring and elevating the sacred. Black people have a right to name themselves, to develop themselves and develop new forms of relationships and practice rooted in communal love and care. When Black transgender and queer people name themselves, it is in this same Afrikan tradition of self determination, bodily autonomy, ancestral veneration, and resisting capture by the state.
On June 28, 1969, the first night of the Stonewall Uprising, the founding members of the Gay Liberation Front marched to the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village. The incarcerated women and the protestors outside began to chant “Gay Power” and other liberation chants demanding the freedom of the Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird (members of the Panther 21/New York Black Panther Party who were captured by the FBI as part of their COINTELPRO operation) and other incarcerated folks.
The spirit of Black feminist transnational solidarity led Afeni Shakur to draft a list of demands at the 1970 Black Panther Party’s “Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention” in Philadelphia. These demands would draw the connections between gay liberation and Black liberation and highlight the unique experiences of incarcerated queer folks, similar to the S.T.A.R Manifesto.
One gay man wrote that Shakur said that seeing a Gay Liberation banner in the crowd [at the protest outside the House of Detention] made her think for the first time about gay people and Gay Liberation. She then began relating to the gay sisters in jail beginning to understand their oppression, their anger and the strength in them and in all gay people. She talked about how Huey Newton’s statement would be used in the Panther Party, not as a party line, but as a basis for criticism and self-criticism to overcome anti-homosexual hang-ups among party members, and in the Black community. She also helped formulate what we wanted to say in our list of demands.
Jim Chesebro, a gay liberationist from Minneapolis, reported, “The Philadelphia session demonstrated that Blacks, Women, and Gay people can be united and can act together under one philosophical commitment to ‘human dignity’ and ‘self-determination.’”
As fascism continues to rise throughout the world, we remember and honor the many ways the Black women and other marginalized gendered folks have demonstrated solidarity with one another across nation, border, gender expression, sexuality, disability, class, and difference. To be in solidarity with the struggles of Black women and Black gender oppressed people is to be in solidarity with the land. To build unity across differences doesn’t erase one’s unique experience, rather it expands our collective understanding of the many ways the state criminalizes, oppresses, and harms us all. Let this potent radical love encapsulate you this Women’s History Month. We are the sisters of the yam. ✦
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