By Temitope Ogunleye (she/her)
Part 1 of 4
This series contains discussions of misogyny, police brutality, racism, and sexual violence
Can you recall the last time you were deeply thirsty? Not just for water, but for rest, for grace, for room to breathe? When your body grew heavy with longing and your voice wavered under the weight of it. What did you reach for? What gesture, however small, offered relief?
This piece emerges from that same question. It asks not only how Black women across the world endure the unbearable, but how they respond to it. What movements, silences, and rituals do they offer when the world dries them out? I began this reflection while studying the Sudanese Revolution in a Black Feminism course, where I was struck by how little attention was paid to the women at its heart.
In mainstream coverage, the story of resistance is often stripped of its full texture. But across the globe, Black women resist in ways that are often overlooked or misunderstood: through dance, through song, through the exposure of the body itself. In the Niger Delta (Ekine, 2010), in the Red Thread collective (Stabroek News, 2023), in Sudan’s public squares (Elamin & Ismail, 2019; Mathebula, 2022), they show us that defiance can take many forms and that vulnerability is not passivity.
These gestures are not incidental. They are the resistance. This piece is a response to their erasure and an invitation to look again and to recognise that these acts of defiance are neither new nor isolated.
Framing the Erasure
There is a spirit of collective resistance that echoes throughout Black feminist traditions. Women do not organise as individuals alone, but as communities bound by solidarity. The Red Thread collective in Guyana and Black feminist networks in the Niger Delta (Ekine, 2010; Stabroek News, 2023) exemplify this. One of Red Thread’s core principles is solidarity across difference. When one woman is threatened, the community responds: ‘Hands off the women of Red Thread. Touch one! Touch all’ (Stabroek News, 2023).
This value of mutual protection runs deep. In Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina’s community defends its most vulnerable when attacked (Butler, 2019). Similarly, in the Niger Delta, women gather to acknowledge violence and environmental harm, shielding one another from its consequences (Ekine, 2010). These moments - literary and real - show how Black women resist when both body and land are under siege.
Despite this history, media coverage often casts these women as passive victims, not architects of change. The focus on suffering may evoke sympathy, but it obscures their resistance, their brilliance, their bravery. This pattern is global. In Brazil’s favelas, Black women have organised against state violence through neighborhood patrols and education (Dear Black Woman, n.d.). These acts are rarely widely publicised, yet they have always existed. This series will name them.
JUMP TO NEXT: Black Women and Alternative Resistance: Dance
Read the full series:
PART 1 - Black Women and Alternative Resistance: Architects of Change
PART 2 - Black Women and Alternative Resistance: Dance
PART 3 - Black Women and Alternative Resistance: Nudity
PART 4 - Black Women and Alternative Resistance: Writing and Voice
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References
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Head image: Ngorongoro public forum, CC 2.0 by Oxfam East Africa