Guardian · 5 hours ago

‘There’s Always Been a Belittling of African women’: Honouring history’s Invisible Heroines | Global Development | the Guardian

Congolese photographer Pamela Tulizo began her series *Mababu* ("ancestors" in Swahili) with a question she had carried since childhood: where does the extraordinary strength of African women come from? What she found in her research was not just resilience, but erasure - women who had resisted slavery and colonialism, fought and died for freedom, and been written out of history anyway. "Because of racism, there's always been this belittling of African women that portrays them as vulnerable, as victims," Tulizo says, "and I wanted to end that narrative by showing that despite everything they endured, they remained strong and fought for freedom." Through cinematic staging, vivid costume, and the deliberate use of fashion as a form of tribute, she restores dignity to figures history forgot - and in doing so, draws a quiet, devastating line between the tobacco and sugar that once fueled the slave trade and the lithium and gold driving conflict in her homeland today. Her work is a reckoning and a reclamation at once: proof that to name someone's strength, finally and fully, can itself be an act of justice.