At eight years old, and while her father (a doctor) was out of town, Edna was “caught, held down” and her genitals were cut and sewn up with acacia thorns, without any anesthetic.

When her father came back and heard that Edna had been the victim of female genital mutilation (FGM), he was horrified. Edna said “that was the only time I ever saw him with tears in his eyes.” The reaction of her father convinced Edna that what had happened to her was wrong. She would hold fast to this belief. So too, across the span of her career in the medical profession, she held onto the spirit of rebellion born out of the emotional and physical pain FGM had inflicted on her.

“The fight against FGM has been the biggest battle of my life…  and every moment of my life has been a battle.”

As a young woman, Edna battled against the rigidity of British Somaliland’s patriarchal education system to become the first Somali woman to study in Britain. When she returned to Somaliland as its first qualified nurse and midwife, she had to fight for 22 months before the state would pay her to work in a government hospital under contract.

It was even a battle for her to hold a driving license, despite having learned to drive in Britain, because she was the first woman to hold a driving license in her country.

Edna worked her way up the ladder of the civil service in what was then Somalia, becoming the first female director of the Ministry of Health. After civil war broke out she was forced to leave and moved to the World Health Organization (WHO), where she worked as the WHO Representative to Djibouti, helping to pass legislation outlawing FGM.

Yet she still did not have the job she craved. She wanted to be director of her own hospital. A hospital where her father would have been proud to work. A hospital that could tackle maternal mortality as the leading cause of death among women of reproductive age in her country – all too often due to a complete lack of prenatal care, or complications from FGM.

“Our women die of causes that no woman in this day and age, when man has reached the moon, no woman should die of.”

In 1997, she retired from the WHO and cashed in her pension. Then she sold her Mercedes-Benz, her jewellery, even her dishwasher, and purchased a piece of land in Hargeisa. The land had formerly been a graveyard, then later a military parade ground, infamous for executions and torture. In 1997 it functioned as a local rubbish dump. But for Edna, this land represented the first concrete step towards fulfilling her lifelong dream of building a hospital in Somaliland.

Edna had just around $300,000 to make her dream hospital a reality, but in her mind she “never had any doubts”. When the money ran out and the hospital still had no roof or equipment, Edna plowed on, and, with the help of donors she had inspired across the U.S.A. and the Somali diaspora, a foundation called ‘Friends of Edna’s Hospital’ was able to raise enough money to help her complete the project.

Edna was 65 years old when she opened Somaliland’s first maternity hospital in 2002.

“Because a problem is difficult, you must deal with it. And because it takes a long time you must stick to it, constantly. That is the way we can bring about change.”

Since opening, the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital has trained 540 midwives and completed 247 fistula repair surgeries. 22,144 babies were delivered in Edna’s hospital between its opening and 31 January 2018, and it is ranked 13^th out of 205 hospitals across the African continent. The patients pay what they can afford, women receive counselling against perpetuating the harms of FGM on their daughters, and all who come to the hospital are treated, including for non-maternal and emergency issues. It is a well of life springing from a former valley of death.

Edna, now 81 years old, lives in a small flat above “my home, my hospital” and continues to work vigorously towards cutting maternal mortality and ending FGM – which, in her words, “is simply a matter of will”.

©The Heroine Collective 2018 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: Berkleycenter.georgetown.edu. (2013). A Discussion with Edna Adan Ismail, Director and Founder of the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Hargeisa, Somaliland. [online] Available at: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/interviews/a-discussion-with-edna-adan-ismail-director-and-founder-of-the-edna-adan-maternity-hospital-in-hargeisa-somaliland [Accessed 9 May 2018]. Carson, M. (2016). Edna Adan: ‘With my army of midwives, fewer girls will go through FGM’. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/12/edna-adan-with-my-army-of-midwives-fewer-girls-will-go-through-fgm [Accessed 6 Apr. 2018]. Devi, S. (2018). Edna Adan Featured In The Lancet | Edna Adan Hospital Foundation. [online] Ednahospitalfoundation.org. Available at: http://ednahospitalfoundation.org/edna-adan-featured-in-the-lancet/ [Accessed 9 May 2018]. Ednahospitalfoundation.org. (2018). What We Do | Edna Adan Hospital Foundation. [online] Available at: http://ednahospitalfoundation.org/about/what-we-do/ [Accessed 9 May 2018]. Grant, K. (2012). The Muslim Mother Teresa. [online] HuffPost. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kate-grant/edna-adan_b_1925711.html [Accessed 6 Apr. 2018]. Halftheskymovement.org. (n.d.). Edna Adan. [online]. Halftheskymovement.org. Available at: http://www.halftheskymovement.org/pages/edna-adan.html [Accessed 7 Apr. 2018]. Hospitals.webometrics.info. (2018). Africa | Ranking Web of Hospitals. [online] Available at: http://hospitals.webometrics.info/en/ranking_africa [Accessed 10 May 2018]. HuffPost. (2013). Tiny Hands and Big Smiles: Faces From Edna Adan Maternity Hospital. [online] Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/friends-of-ednaas-maternity-hospital/friends-of-ednas-maternity-hospital-_b_3346394.html [Accessed 9 May 2018]. Kristof, N. and WuDunn, S. (2010). Half the Sky: How to Change the World. Great Britain: Virago Press, pp.137-144. Ismail, E. (2013). Every Woman Deserves Obstetric Care Fit for a Queen. [online] HuffPost. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/maternal-mortality_b_3690509.html [Accessed 9 May 2018]. ReliefWeb. (2012). Mortality rates among world’s highest in Somaliland. [online] Available at: https://reliefweb.int/report/somalia/mortality-rates-among-worlds-highest-somaliland [Accessed 10 May 2018]. Topping, A. (2014). Somaliland’s leading lady for women’s rights: ‘It is time for men to step up’. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/23/somaliland-womens-rights-gender-violence [Accessed 7 Apr. 2018]. Werber, C. (2016). Unicef: 98% of women in Somalia have undergone female genital mutilation. [online] Quartz. Available at: https://qz.com/610930/unicef-98-of-women-in-somalia-have-undergone-female-genital-mutilation/ [Accessed 13 May 2018]. Whitcraft, T. (2012). How Edna Adan Built Somaliland’s First Maternity Hospital. [online] HuffPost. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/teri-whitcraft/how-edna-adan-built-somal_b_1930676.html [Accessed 9 May 2018]. Young, K. (2017). Desert Island Discs. [Radio] London: BBC Radio 4. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b099w3v2 [Accessed 7 Apr. 2018]. YouTube. (2011). TEDxRC2 – Edna Adan Ismail – If We Can Train Midwives in Somaliland, Everyone Can!. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxJ8LELZCjo [Accessed 13 May 2018].

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Walker was born Sarah Breedlove on 23 December 1867 on a Louisiana cotton plantation. One of five children, she was was orphaned at seven years old, married at fourteen and widowed at twenty, with a daughter to support.

She took her daughter A’Leila to St Louis where her brothers had established themselves as barbers in the city. There, she began working as a washerwoman, and earned enough money to be able to send A’Leila to school in St Louis. It was in St Louis that she met her second husband Charles J. Walker who worked in newspaper sales.

During the 1890s, she suffered from alopecia and began to experiment with different treatments, including those by Annie Malone, another pioneering black entrepreneur. Hair loss was a common ailment among black women at the time, due to scalp diseases and products which damaged hair – not to mention stress and poor diet.

In 1905, Breedlove began working as an agent for entrepreneur Annie Turnbo’s company, Pope Malone’s Poro Co. She sold their product The Great Wonderful Hair Grower whilst also experimenting with her own products. During this period, Breedlove and her family relocated to Denver, and she began to use the name Madam CJ Walker for her own business.

The centre of her business became Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower – a scalp conditioning and healing formula. Walker sold her products directly to black women. The philosophy behind the products was ‘cleanliness and loveliness’, which also had a political agenda behind it: advancing the status of African Americans in American society.

The products were hugely successful and in 1908, the company opened a factory and a beauty school in Pittsburg. The business relocated to Indianapolis in 1910 where they manufactured cosmetics and trained sales beauticians. Walker trained her saleswomen to use ‘The Walker Method’, a combination of scalp preparation, application of lotions, and the use of hot iron combs, resulting in smooth hair. These agents became known as ‘Walker Agents’ and were well known to black communities across America.

Walker went on to employ 40,000 African American men and women across the United States, Central America and Caribbean. And she was a generous employer –she established a nationwide network of employees, and offered bonuses and prizes to employees who contributed to the wider community through charitable work. She was a tireless champion of women, and ran training programs in the ‘Walker System’ for her employees. The charter of her company stated that only a woman could serve as its president. Throughout her life, she donated huge amounts of money to charity; founded educational scholarships for African Americans; supported many philanthropic organisations for the advancement of African Americans in America.

In 1913, Walker and her husband divorced. She moved to Harlem in 1916, and quickly became embedded within the political and cultural scene, visiting The White House to present a petition for anti-lynching legislation. That same year (1917), Walker’s ‘Hair Culturists Union of America’ organised one of the first national meetings of business women in America.

Madam CJ Walker died of kidney failure at the age of 51 on 25 May 1919. A’Leila inherited her Harlem townhouse which went on to become an epicentre of the Harlem Renaissance. When she died, Walker’s businesses was valued at more than $1 million, making her one of the first American woman to become a self-made millionaire.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Time Magazine, How America’s First Self Made Female Millionaire Built Her Fortune by Jennifer Latson, 23.12.14: http://time.com/3641122/sarah-breedlove-walker/ Time Magazine, Madam CJ Walker: Her Crusade by Henry Louis Gates Jr, 07.12.98: http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,989788-1,00.html / The New York Times, Obituary: Wealthiest Negress Dead, 26.05.19: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1223.html / Biography, Madam CJ Walker: https://www.biography.com/people/madam-cj-walker-9522174 / Women’s History, Madam CJ Walker by Debra Michals: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/madam-cj-walker / Madam CJ Walker: https://www.mcjwbeautyculture.com/about-madam-c-j-walker-beauty-culture/#.Wk6IwFSFit8

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Born in 1917 in Topeca, Kansas, Brooks moved to Chicago when she was barely six weeks old. She was to live in the city for the rest of her life, and to consider it not only the backdrop but an essential component of her work. A voracious reader and writer, Brooks was only thirteen when her poem Eventide was published in the children’s magazine American Childhood.

A few years later, her mother took her to hear Langston Hughes read his work at Chicago’s Metropolitan church. Brooks approached Hughes and watched while he intently read her work. He told her that she had talent and that if she kept writing, she would have her books published. That encouragement was everything that the sixteen-year-old needed to persevere.  As she said in an interview sixty years later: “I just knew that I would write and keep writing as long as I was here, whether my writing was published or not.”

But published she was: by her late teens, she had become a regular contributor to the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, a newspaper by and for African Americans. In 1945, she published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, which earned her praise by the critics, a Guggenheim fellowship and an appointment as fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

However, it was the publication of Annie Allen in 1949 that made her name as a writer. For this collection of poems, which focused on a young girl growing up in the Bronzeville neighbourhood in South Chicago, Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. At the time, she and her husband Henry Blakely had a young son and were struggling to the point that they had been unable to pay the bills and had no electricity. Upon the announcement of the award, Brooks was mortified at the possibility of having the photographers and cameramen around to her home with no electricity. However, someone (she was never to find out who), quietly paid her bills and thus spared her the embarrassment.

In 1967 Brook’s writing took on a sharper political edge, after she attended the Second Black Writers’ Conference at Nashville’s Fisk University. Here she was exposed to new black cultural nationalism and, consequently, became more aware of her role within the black community.

In 1968, she published In the Mecca, which marked a shift not only in focus (this being her most political work) but also in tone. Her style became more energetic and essential, infused with a new urge – that of connecting black people’s perspectives and experiences all over the world, starting from her surroundings in South Chicago to the people she met on her travels through Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana.

As her success grew, so did her involvement with her beloved South Side community, for whom she taught and held workshops. Brooks taught creative writing to members of violent gangs, to the poor, the uneducated, to children. She encouraged her students to see beauty in their surroundings and to believe themselves just as special as the writers they looked up to. She hosted and sponsored varied literary events and awards.

In 1968 she was appointed Poet Laureate of the state of Illinois: a role she held until her death. Its duties included visits to hospitals, prisons, drugs rehabilitation centres and schools. By 1995, when Brooks was finishing the second volume of her autobiography, she had been serving as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress for ten years. She had been 68 years of age when she was appointed – and had been the first black woman to be given the role. In 1994, she was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities as ‘Jefferson Lecturer’, the highest award in the humanities, and given by the federal government.

She died in 2000, then aged 83, in her Chicago home. She once said in an interview: “I want to write poems that will be non-compromising… poems that will be meaningful.” Her work proves, time and again, that she succeeded.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Grigsby Bates, Karen. Remembering The Great Poet Gwendolyn Brooks At 100. NPR. 2 May 2017. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/05/29/530081834/remembering-the-great-poet-gwendolyn-brooks-at-100 // Williams, Kenny Jackson. Brooks’ Life and Career. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/brooks/life.htm // Poetry Foundation: Gwendolyn Brooks. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gwendolyn-brooks // Howard County Poetry and Literature Society. An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks. 15 October 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVZ6KTLN7O8 // Lincoln Academy. 1997 Interview Gwendolyn Brooks.  11 September 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsZJZPm7pt0

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Toni, whose given name was actually Chloe Anthony Woodward, was born in Lorain, Ohio, on 18 February 1931. She was raised in an integrated neighborhood, a rarity in America during that time. As such, her experiences growing up were very different from that of many other African-American children raised in America prior to the Civil Rights Movement.

“When I was in first grade, nobody thought I was inferior. I was the only black in the class and the only child who could read.”

Despite growing up in an integrated community, black culture was an integral part of Toni’s upbringing. While it’s true that Toni grew up reading works by Austen, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, she also grew up surrounded by African-American storytelling and folklore. Her father, a welder who often worked multiple jobs in order to support their family, would tell her stories steeped in African-American tradition, and these stories went on to have a tremendous impact on her work.

Toni was bright, graduating from Lorain High School with honors, after which time she went on to attend Howard University, a historically black college in Washington DC. At Howard, she majored in English and minored in Classics before going on to Cornell University, where she earned her masters degree in 1955.

After graduating from Cornell, Toni worked briefly as a teacher at Texas Southern University before returning to Howard, where she taught English from 1957 to 1964. During that time, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. The two fell in love and were married a short time later, and in 1961, she gave birth to their first child. However, the marriage was short-lived, and in 1963, Toni made the decision to leave her husband, despite the fact that she was pregnant with their second child.

Toni moved back to Ohio to have the baby, but she relocated to New York shortly after he was born.  She began working as senior editor at a publishing house in Syracuse before moving on to work at Random House. During this time, she also began working on her first novel, The Bluest Eye, a book she’s described as the one she always wanted to read but couldn’t because it didn’t exist. Writing a book is a massive undertaking, particularly when you’re a working, single mother of 2, but Toni wasn’t about to let that stop her. Instead, she got up every morning at 4am and carefully crafted the story of Pecola, a young, African-American girl who desperately longs for blue eyes. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 and marked the beginning of Toni’s long, prolific writing career.

“… being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.”

Over the next 17 years, Toni wrote four more novels, all dealing with various aspects of the black experience in America. Sula was published in 1973, Song of Solomon followed in 1977, and in 1981, she released Tar Baby. All three garnered critical acclaim and raised her profile as a writer, but it was Beloved, published in 1987, that really cemented her position as one of America’s most important literary voices.

“Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours… tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light.”

Beloved, which was loosely based on true events, tells the story of Sethe. Sethe was enslaved in the American south, but she, and her children, managed to escape the horrors of slavery and flee to the North. However, their freedom was short-lived, as a group of slave hunters found them in Ohio less than a month after their escape. Unable to watch her daughter suffer the same way she did, Sethe kills her 2-year-old baby girl in an effort to save her from a life spent as a slave. That decision haunts her, both literally and figuratively, throughout the novel.

Beloved garnered tremendous critical acclaim and won her the respect of her fellow writers. In fact, when the National Book Award for that year was announced, and the winner wasn’t Beloved, forty-eight African-American writers signed a letter of protest, which was ultimately published in The New York Times. While it may not have won the National Book Award, Beloved did go on to win a number of prestigious honors, including the Pulitzer Prize.

Two years after the publication of Beloved, Toni began working at Princeton University, where she spent the next seventeen years helping aspiring writers grow and develop. During that time, she continued writing novels, producing important essays and works of literary criticism, and winning awards for her work, including the Nobel Prize for Literature. She retired from teaching in 2006, but she continues to write. In the time since her retirement, she has completed several additional books (both fiction and non-fiction), and she has continued to be recognized for the importance of her work with a number of awards, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-facts.html, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Toni-Morrison, https://www.biography.com/people/toni-morrison-9415590, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/25/toni-morrison-books-interview-god-help-the-child, https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliapugachevsky/impossibly-beautiful-toni-morrison-quotes?utm_term=.mhAdZ3lkl#.ajbN3lRxR, http://mashable.com/2015/04/26/toni-morrison-quotes/#8_umg5lxxgqz

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As a child, Bentley developed tender feelings for a female teacher and was often sent home for going to school in boys’ clothes. Her parents took her from doctor to doctor in an attempt to fix what they perceived as a deviation from traditionally feminine behaviour.

At sixteen, Bentley moved to New York. A talented singer and pianist, she was soon offered $400 by a Broadway agent to record eight tracks. But wanting to play to live audiences, Bentley also started filling in for unavailable entertainers in bars until one night she heard that the Mad House in Harlem needed a pianist. Even though they were looking for a male performer, she convinced the boss to let her play and wowed audience and owner to such an extent that she was immediately offered a regular contract.

In Harlem, Bentley was free to be herself. From the early 1920s to the mid 1930s, in what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, blacks and whites, homosexuals and heterosexual were brought together in Harlem by Prohibition and their joyous, alcohol-fuelled rebellion against it. It was the decade of the “New Negro”, when African Americans poured in from the whole country and became unprecedentedly prominent in literature, art, music and political debate.

Bentley thrived in such environment. She embraced her sexuality and “bulldagger” (or butch) identity and made it part of her performance. While as a blues singer she followed the trope of the down-on-her-luck woman mistreated by men, as a nightclub entertainer Bentley donned masculine outfits and haircuts, flirted with women, and performed sexually charged songs whose lyrics were often a rewritten, bawdy version of popular white ballads. She is considered one of the first drag kings, and impersonated that kind of mock, stereotyped masculinity that is typical of drag acts. However she did not try to pass for a man, nor was she preoccupied with concealing her love for women off the stage. Unlike other queer black female performers of the time, Bentley was open about her sexual orientation and at one point claimed to have married a woman.

Even though occasionally outraged, the public loved Bentley’s performance, her raucous act and lewd lyrics. From her first performance at the Mad House, Bentley’s ascent to fame was rapid and, for a while, unstoppable. She played in some of Harlem’s most famous clubs and speakeasies, such as Harry Hansberry’s Clam House and the Lafayette Theatre, and she recorded with a number of labels, including Okeh and Victor. As her popularity and her wages rose, she moved from Harlem to Park Avenue and enjoyed a degree of luxury she had never known before.

The financial crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed dealt a severe blow to Harlem, but Bentley remained popular throughout the first half of the 1930s, when, even after many of the clubs she used to sing in had shut down, she was still performing in Harlem’s Ubangi club.

In 1937 she moved to California, where she kept performing to enthusiastic audiences. However, the harassment she had occasionally experienced in Harlem for wearing men clothes and flaunting her sexuality intensified and in the 1950s the fear and paranoia of the McCarthy era stripped her of the assuredness of her early career.

In 1952, an article by Bentley titled “I Am a Woman Again” was published in Ebony magazine. Bentley claimed to have sought a hormonal treatment to enable her to love men the way she used to love women. The article is illustrated by photographs of her preparing the bed and dinner for her husband. One of them is captioned: “Miss Bentley enjoys [the] domestic role which she shunned for years.” Bentley claims to seek redemption and be looking for forgiveness, but some believe that she stepped back into the closet because she was worried about her career and the responsibility of taking care of her mother. She was briefly married to a man but it is likely that she kept having relationships with women.

In the 1950s while keeping on recording, Bentley became a prominent member of the Temple of Love in Christ Church, Inc and was ordained a minister. One of her last public appearances was on Groucho Marx’s TV show You Bet Your Life, where, now in a dress and with long hair, she claimed she had 500 songs at hand and showed the charisma and verve of her early years. She had just finished writing her memoir, If This Be Sin, but had not found a publisher.

She died of pneumonia in January 1960.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: Bentley, Gladys. “I Am a Woman Again.” Ebony. Vol. vii, no. 10, August 1952. // Bentley, Gladys and Groucho Marx. “You Bet Your Life.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LTJNasTMc // Dunlap, David W. “Icon of Harlem’s Gay Night Life Gives Way to Wreckers.” The New York Times City Room. 10 March 2013. // Escudero-Alìas, Maite. Long Live the King: A Genealogy of Performative Genders. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Publishing Scholars. 2009. // Johnson, Kjerstin. “Adventures in Feministory: Gladys Bentley” Bitch Media.  http://www.bitchmedia.org/post/adventures-in-feministory-gladys-bentley. 7 November 2011. // Peril, Lynn. “Gladys Bentley Was The Gender Nonconforming, Lesbian Superstar Of The Harlem Renaissance” Bust Magazine. http://bust.com/feminism/18503-gladys-bentley-clam-jam.html // Wilson, James F. Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 2010.

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I should know.

When I was six years old, I plunged into a vortex of legal invisibility and remained trapped in its grip for nearly 15 years.

Born in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, I travelled to the United States in 1988 on a visitor visa to join my mother and father, overstayed, and lived in undocumented limbo until I was 20.

This twist of fate may have been the best thing to happen to me.

In Toni Morrison’s haunting novel Beloved, the protagonist, Sethe, kills her two-year-old daughter rather than surrender her to a lifetime of bondage in American chattel slavery. Call it intuition, but by flouting US immigration laws, my parents eventually shielded me from 14 years of intermittent armed conflict.

As we celebrated my second Christmas Eve in the heart of Washington, DC, a militia of counter-insurgents invaded Liberia from Ivory Coast in 1989, spiralling the country into an abyss of death and destruction.

Had it not been for the brutal inconvenience of war – or the inconvenient brutality – I probably would have spent long sultry holidays in my country of birth. Sitting under a plum tree reading. Playing Knockfoot, Hopscotch and I Die until dusk with a bevy of cousins. Learning to speak Bassa and Kru fluently, with perfect intonation.

I was relatively oblivious to my peculiar status in the US because I came of age in the 1990s U Street corridor of DC, when chocolate city was actually chocolate.

Now a gentrified mass of whiteness, Adams Morgan back then was a bustling abode for first and second-generation brown and black immigrants from Central America, the Caribbean, West and East Africa.

While some of us had legitimate American identity documents, others did not.

Within my fortified elementary school compound, our legal statuses – or lack thereof – remained refreshingly divorced from the messy politics of immigration. Ours was a world filled with cultural dress days, Amharic, Spanish, Chinese and sign language classes, tastes of the town, excursions to stage plays and movies like Dreamgirls and Sarafina! Back then, the sharp lines between legality and illegality rarely factored into my pre-pubescent consciousness.

Not having legal status in the US all those years made me fiercely Liberian, unabashedly African.

Yet, while I felt affirmed in my immigrant identity, as I grew older it became increasingly obvious that I was trapped. Back then legal invisibility felt like an albatross around the neck, choking me slowly. Cutting off circulation. Stifling my potential.

It was paralysis personified.

While I was physically present [visible] in the US, I remained absent [hidden] from the entitlements that legal visibility affords. The privileges and protections that most Americans take for granted – authorisation to work, go to school or access healthcare – were unreachable.

I attended private middle and high schools because they were better quality, yes, but also because the public ones asked too many questions about my legal status.

Most undocumented migrants struggle over whether to conceal or reveal too much of themselves. Both actions involve calculated risks. Often accused of being entirely too private, guarded or elusive, I never quite understood the compulsion to overshare.

When a trip to Italy with my high school choir came up, I conjured up an excuse for why I could not go.

While classmates padded their resumes with vacation jobs or traipsed off to Europe or South America on exotic summer holidays, I stayed at home sulking.

During my senior year of high school, an offer from New York University arrived in a coveted white and purple 8 x 11 envelope, and I finally felt vindicated.

But legal invisibility meant ineligibility for federal aid so I had to decline.

I remember walking home dejected, nostrils flaring, heaving with an indescribable pain in my chest. “Mom, I’m stuck”, I said, uncontrollable tears streaming down my face because yet another opportunity had eluded me.

What I discovered awaits the undocumented is not “heaven on earth” but rather an endless checklist of unfulfilled desires.

Fully human

But there’s another realm of undocumented life that does not get captured in the mainstream. Legal invisibility renders some of us visible in other, more profound ways.

In Liberian cosmology, if your navel string (umbilical cord) is buried in a particular place, you maintain a metaphysical connection to it. Not having legal status in the US all those years made me fiercely Liberian, unabashedly African.

My parents and I created a universe of yearnings that could be met, filled with regular forays into Liberiandom. In our parallel world there were no visa restrictions, surveillance systems or rabid immigration officials.

There was only the possibility of being fully human, of thriving rather than simply surviving.

As a child I attended Liberian community association meetings with my suspenders-clad dad, where the pulse of politics was palpable.

My mother, younger sister Ella and I relished our summer trips to Staten Island, New York, travelling in a ferry while saluting the Statue of Liberty.

The projects of Park Hill – otherwise known as “little Liberia” – were like Monrovia suburbs transplanted in the US. We’d lounge on concrete sidewalks until the wee hours of the morning, roasting succulent meat skewers with a concoction of hot pepper sauce served on a soft bed of thinly chopped onions.

In young adulthood, I joined the Liberian Studies Association, learned how to cook Liberian cuisine – well, sort of – and perfected the lilting Liberian English that rolls off the tongue like an unstoppable locomotive.

I studied Africa intently, dissecting it under a microscope. I was fascinated as much by the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the ancient manuscripts in Mali, Mosi-oa-Tunya in Zimbabwe, as I was by our pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial cleavages.

Rather than cowering in fear of being exposed and expelled, I now travel the world with an intense sense of purpose and defiance, trying to make what was once invisible, visible.

Intensely bookish, I became hypersensitive about the world’s inequities, and obsessive over how my birthday – April 12 – changed the trajectory of Liberia’s history for better or worse.

As the war in Liberia raged on, extinguishing people and places in its path, my parents hosted family and friends fleeing the conflict all the while toiling to make me legally visible. My mother worked two jobs to cover exorbitant immigration fees, filled out countless forms in microscopic fine print, justifying my existence.

Legal visibility

In 2000 when I was 18, I watched my mother raise her right hand and pledge allegiance to the so-called “free world”.

In the small room in downtown DC with official-looking, mahogany furniture, a six-foot US flag billowed in the background during the naturalisation proceedings.

As keynote speaker, the president of Howard University (where I was then a freshman undergraduate) regaled the newly minted US citizens with clichés about what a wonderful place America was.

However, my mother naturalised on that eventful day, not because of some deep, abiding love for America, but because she needed US citizenship to regularise my status. Her revocation of Liberian citizenship represented, for me, the pinnacle of parental sacrifice.

When I finally got a US residency card in 2002 – aged 20 – I genuflected in gratitude to my mother, yanked off the albatross and traded it in for something more wholesome: the freedom of movement that comes with legal visibility.

My childhood and adolescent experiences made me immobile, yet an inner restlessness has compelled me to keep it moving, literally, in adulthood.

In my 20s I lived in six countries covering three continents at different intervals, a kind of “instability” that my father chides even to this day.

During my third year at Howard, I studied abroad at the universities of Ghana and Cape Town for four and six months, respectively.

After undergrad, I spent a year freelance consulting and interning at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, followed by a 12-month stint as assistant editor of The Washington Informer in Washington, DC.

Europe enticed me further afield with a full scholarship to study African history and politics at Oxford. A few days after graduation, I hopped on a jumbo jet plane to my country of birth to write speeches for the first female president of Liberia – and Africa – on a one-year fellowship that transformed into four.

As I lectured part-time at two Liberian universities my love of scholarship blossomed into an obsession. So, I resigned from high-profile public service in my late 20s and relocated to London for a PhD at SOAS.

During a research trip to Haiti in 2014, I stumbled upon a store off the beaten path, pulled an astrology book from the shelf, flipped through its crisp pages for April 12 and discovered that I was destined to be a nomad in my 20s and 30s before settling into comfortable stasis in my 40s. So far, reality has eerily fulfilled this prophecy.

Rather than cowering in fear of being exposed and expelled, I now travel the world with an intense sense of purpose and defiance, trying to make what was once invisible, visible.

Towards more humane policies

Undocumented migrants contribute enormously to the economies of the so-called Global North as cheap labour, yet they are spurned by those who benefit most from this informal system of exploitation. They literally clean up the shit that no one else wants to see or smell, in more ways than one.

Contrary to popular imagination, most migrants – undocumented and documented alike – are not leeches feeding off a system of finite resources reserved for non-migrants.

It was certainly the bittersweet days of living under the radar that moulded me into a fully minted, itinerant Liberian with an American twang.

Like my parents, they work two, three, sometimes four jobs to get by while supporting entire households abroad. It is virtually impossible to exploit a system that does not even recognise you as human, much less visible.

Undocumented migrants have become the scapegoats of politicians as a cover up for their failures in responding to the needs of the documented.

Even the prefixes we use to describe those without legal status point to their presumed “abnormality”: extra-legal, irregular, illegal, unauthorised.

Truth be told, legal statutes and statuses do not adequately capture the unique backstories of migrants like me and my parents. Many migrants like my six-year-old self travel legally and only become undocumented after overstaying short-term visas, or because of constantly shifting immigration rules. As a consequence, documented migrants like my now 35-year-old self have been undocumented at some point in their lives.

If we considered undocumented migrants not as invasive “swarms” of racialised, ethnicised “others”, but as human beings with the same fears, hopes and aspirations as the documented, more humane, evidence-based policies would surely materialise.

The past 20 years of migration research has proven that acute restrictions on movement such as border controls, fortified walls, executive bans, deportations and other severe measures actually produce more clandestine forms of migration putting migrants at risk. Criminalising migrants is clearly not the solution.

Instead, there is a need for general amnesties for the undocumented, fast-tracked regularisation programmes, family reunification schemes and free movement of persons protocols.

With 15 eventful years of legal visibility under my belt, I can’t help reflecting on the moments that have most profoundly shaped the contours of my life.

It was certainly the bittersweet days of living under the radar that moulded me into a fully minted, itinerant Liberian with an American twang.

This enhanced rather than constrained my ability to aspire.

This essay commentary was originally published in Al Jazeera English. Permission for republication  was granted by Robtel Neajai Pailey in July 2017.

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The death of her father in 1617 caused political chaos and resulted in Njinga’s brother, Mbande, becoming ngola. Ngola Mbande murdered all whom he saw as political rivals, including Njinga’s son. Unsatisfied and paranoid, reports suggest that he then attempted to sterilise his three sisters by arranging for boiling oils to be poured over their stomachs. None of the sisters would ever give birth to another child.

As an infertile woman, Njinga’s life was spared. She fled and joined the Imbangalas, male-dominated marauding bands of warriors. There she led guerrilla raids on the Portuguese, while she waited for the opportune moment to re-enter the Ndongo political scene.

This moment came in 1622, when she was asked by her brother to negotiate a peace treaty with the Portuguese Governor. Njinga came prepared: she knew that the Portuguese would make her sit on the floor. This was a common exercise in humiliation for visiting African emissaries. Njinga, however, was to be the exception. Entering the Governor’s chamber, she indicated to a handmaid, who immediately dropped to her knees, creating a seat on which Njinga sat for the entirety of the negotiations.

Njinga’s canny political diplomacy was demonstrated by her agreement to be baptised a Catholic, taking the name Ana de Sousa in honour of the Governor’s wife. Njinga had many names in her lifetime, adopting and discarding them as it suited her need.

Njinga became Ngola Kiluanje (Queen of Angola) when her brother died in 1625. As ruler, she created trouble for the Portuguese by encouraging the Ndongo noblemen to revolt, ensuring that the Portuguese could not collect their usual monetary tribute. In retaliation, the Governor declared that her gender meant she had no right to rule. This ‘illegitimacy’ was used to start a ‘just war’ against her and, once again, Njinga fled.

She was Ngola Njinga Ngombe e Nga (Queen Njinga, Master of Arms and Great Warrior) whilst in exile. For the second time she led the Imbangalas in acts of resistance, conquering the kingdom of Matamba in 1631 and aligning it with the remainder of independent Ndongo. She not only led her forces into battle herself (at 49 years of age), but she also accepted escaped slaves. The purse of the Portuguese empire was humiliated by Njinga’s resolute war efforts. Between 1630 and 1633 Portuguese slave exports decreased from 13,000 to 0.

A Jesuit missionary from the Kongo noted that “[she] lived an unmarried life just like the queen of the Amazons [and] she governed the army [like] a female warrior.”

Njinga’s gender continued to detract from her achievements. So, she started dressing as a man and took male and female concubines, insisting all wore female garments and slept alongside each other. If the men touched her handmaids sexually, the men would be killed.

There were 29 Portuguese invasions into Ndongo-Matamba between 1648 and 1650 alone. This insecurity, along with the capture of her sister, Barbara, led to another round of peace negotiations with the Portuguese. These concluded successfully in 1656. Njinga secured her sister’s release and refused to concede tribute: “…having been born to rule my kingdom, I should not obey nor recognise another sovereign…”

At nearly 80 years of age, Queen Njinga was no less active in military activities. A Capuchin monk at her court witnessed her perform at a military parade in 1662. Commenting upon her impressive performance, the Queen begged his pardon for her display, saying: “Excuse me, Father, for I am old, but when I was young I yielded nothing in agility or ability… and I was not afraid to face twenty-five armed men.”

Njinga died in 1663 as Queen Doña Ana, a last political maneuver. She had decided that religious alignment with Christian Portugal was the only means to secure her kingdom’s survival, and tirelessly wrote letters to the Pope urging him to acknowledge her Christian revolution. Under the rule of a Christian monarch, her sister Barbara, she believed Ndongo-Matamba would be safe from the Portuguese after her death.

Njinga paved the way for a succession of female rulers in Ndongo-Matamba. Ahead of almost all the Western world, she set a precedent for the acceptance of women in the highest position of power. In the 104 years following her death, women ruled for at least 80 years.

She ruled the second largest kingdom in central Africa for over 40 years, defying gender norms and colonialisation to become a leader grudgingly respected by the Portuguese Empire and the Vatican – two of the then greatest world powers.

African writer Georgina Herrera wrote a tribute to her entitled ‘Song of Love and Respect for Doña Ana de Souza’ which celebrated her incredible life, but acknowledges the suppression of her story: “Oh! Doña Ana, grandmother of anger and kindness […] never prisoner […] your grave is the entire land of Angola, with no flowers, nor tombstones or signs.”

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Horace Campbell, ‘Angolan Woman and the Electoral Process in Angola, 1992’. Africa Development / Afrique et Développement, 18(2), (1993), pp 23-63 // Georgina Herrera, ‘Always Rebellious/ Cimarroneando: Selected Poems by Georgina Herrera’. Cubanabooks (2014) // Linda Heywood, ‘Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen’. Harvard University Press (2017) // Joseph C. Miller, ‘Nzinga of Matamba in a New Perspective’. The Journal of African History, 16(2) (1975), pp 201-216 // John Keegan, ‘A History of Warfare’. New York: Knopf (1993) // John Thornton, ‘Legitimacy and Political Power: Queen Njinga, 1624-1663’. The Journal of African History, 32 (1991), pp 25-40 // John Thornton, ‘The Art of War in Angola, 1575 – 1680’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30(2) (Apr., 1988), pp 360-378.

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Diane was born in London in 1953 to Jamaican parents, her father a welder and her mother a nurse, who had immigrated to Britain a few years earlier. She attended Harrow County Grammar School, the only black pupil at that time. She then went on to study a Masters degree in History at Newham College, Cambridge. She was one of only three black women at the college and described the experience of studying there as “Meeting class and privilege head-on”.

After graduating in 1976, Diane joined the government, working for two years as a civil servant at the Home Office. In 1978 she became a Race Relations Officer at the lobby group National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) and in 1980 embarked on a successful career in journalism. In addition to freelance assignments, she worked as a researcher and reporter at Thames Television and for the breakfast television company, TV-am. She also worked as the Press Officer at the Greater London Council and as the Head of Press and Public Relations at Lambeth Council.

Having joined the Labour Party as a teenager, Diane’s political career began in 1982 when she was elected to Westminster City Council on which she served for four years. In 1987 she was selected as the Labour Party candidate for the London constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington and won the seat with a convincing majority. This made her the UK’s first ever black female MP.

In parliament, much of her work has centred on education, crime, civil liberties, immigration and international issues. She has served on a number of committees, including the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee throughout much of the 1990s and, later, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. She has been a fervent supporter of human rights throughout her parliamentary career and in 2008 she won a special award from Liberty for her achievements in this area.

Diane has become known for her strength of belief and her forthright and occasionally controversial views. On the left of the party, she frequently proved problematic to Labour leader Tony Blair during the ‘New Labour’ era when his reforms meant the abandonment of many traditional socialist policies. Not only was Diane highly critical of Blair but she frequently defied the party whip on issues such as tuition fees and the Iraq war.

In 2010, having been re-elected to her parliamentary seat with a doubled majority, Diane made the ballot for the Labour leadership contest. Her campaign was unsuccessful but helped to promote her agenda and raise her profile. Under Ed Milliband’s leadership, she was propelled to the front benches and became the shadow Public Health Minister. Only a year later The Telegraph described her as one of Labour’s best front bench performers.

Diane was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for International Development in September 2015 and then Shadow Secretary of State for Public Health in June 2016. During Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet reshuffle of October 2016, Diane was elevated to the post of Shadow Home Secretary.

She is founder of the London Schools and the Black Child initiative, which aims to raise educational achievement levels amongst Black children. For this she hosts an annual conference for educators, children and their parents and an annual academic awards ceremony. She recently set up a special parliamentary committee to investigate gun crime and she chairs the All Party Parliamentary British-Caribbean Group. She’s also an experienced public speaker and broadcaster and, until recently, appeared weekly on the BBC’s political discussion programme, This Week, where viewers often enjoyed her sparring with old school friend and former Conservative minister, Michael Portillo.

She is frequently the subject of extreme racist and misogynistic abuse and intense media scrutiny. Diane came under heavy criticism during the run up to the recent snap General Election after a couple of unsuccessful interviews. It later transpired that she has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and was suffering a bout of ill health. She took a step back from the campaign and the Labour front bench shortly before the election in order to recuperate.

Nevertheless, despite setbacks and sustained attacks, she remains undaunted and as determined as ever to work in the service of her community. Diane was re-elected to her seat with her biggest ever majority. What better way to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of her becoming an MP and silence her critics than with such an overwhelming endorsement from the people she represents.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include dianeabbott.org.uk, Hackney Citizen, BBC News, The Telegraph.

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She was born in 1911 in America, after her family had settled in Boston. Tragically, both her parents died of smallpox when Bessie was just five years old. She was then raised by a devout Roman Catholic Irish woman whose identity she never revealed.

Bessie had hankered after a motorcycle throughout high school and when she turned sixteen years old, it is believed that her adoptive mother bought her an Indian Scout. Despite having no previous experience of operating a motorcycle, Bessie clearly had a natural talent and soon became an extremely skilful rider.

Aged just nineteen, Bessie embarked on what was to be the first of eight solo journeys across the USA during the 1930s and 1940s. Bessie criss-crossed the country, earning a living by performing as a carnival stunt-rider and hill-racer in the towns at which stopped en route. She also travelled around Haiti, Europe and South America, often deciding on her next destination by tossing a coin over a map. Her rarity as a black woman motorcycle daredevil, and her extreme skill meant that Bessie soon became something of a celebrity.

Bessie’s motorcycle journeys presented innumerable challenges; not just the dangerous dirt roads and harsh conditions, but prevailing racist attitudes and anti-black legislation made for frequently treacherous situations. It was often difficult for her to find accommodation as many hotels and boarding houses refused to take non-white guests so she would have to stop at gas stations and sleep on her motorbike.

On the road, Bessie encountered racist attacks and abuse, especially in America’s segregated southern states where racially motivated violence was a constant danger. On one occasion, a white male truck driver deliberately ran her off the highway, knocking her into a ditch. These episodes only strengthened Bessie’s resilience and determination. Downplaying her bravery over such experiences she simply said: “I had my ups and downs”.

During the Second World War, Bessie worked for the US Army as a civilian motorcycle dispatch rider. She underwent rigorous military training and was the only woman in her unit. Sporting a military crest on the front of her Harley Davison, Bessie transported vital documents between domestic military bases for four years, crossing the USA on a number of occasions.

Somewhere between her stunt-riding, carnival performances, cross-country adventures and serving her country, Bessie found the time to marry and divorce no less than six times. Her third husband, Arthur Stringfield, asked that she keep his surname after their divorce as she had made it so famous.

During the 1950s, Bessie moved to Miami where she trained and worked as a nurse. She founded the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club and still took part in motorbike events and races. She famously won a flat-track race disguised as a man, but revealed her true identity when she removed her helmet at the finish line and was consequently refused the prize money. Another incident saw her riding her Harley whilst standing upright on its saddle. Her stunts drew the attention of the local press and she got her title: The Motorcycle Queen of Miami.

Bessie was frequently stopped by local police officers who believed that black women had no business to be riding around the state on a motorcycle. Of course, she refused to capitulate and, instead, she arranged a meeting with the Chief of Police at which she demonstrated her exceptional skills on a motorcycle. The Miami police never bothered her again.

As she grew older, Bessie suffered from serious health problems caused by an enlarged heart, but she never let this prevent her from living the way she chose. She continued riding motorbikes right up until her death in 1993 at the age of 82.

The American Motorcyclist Association opened the first Motorcycle Heritage Museum in Ohio in 1990 and honoured Bessie in its inaugural exhibit. Ten years later, it created the Bessie Stringfield Award (given for superior achievement by a woman motorcyclist) in her memory. In 2002, Bessie was posthumously inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame, her entry being written by her biographer Ann Ferrar. In recent years hundreds of women have ridden in the Bessie Stringfield Female-Only Motorcycle Ride.

Eighty years after she first got on a motorcycle, those for whom Bessie paved the way are still celebrating her outstanding achievements, courageous spirit and fearless attitude. A fitting tribute to such a true pioneer.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved.  Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Antique Archaeology, Black America Web, Black Past, Timeline. While the information for this article has been drawn from a number of sources, we are informed that Ann Ferrar is a primary source for many of the articles about Bessie Stringfield. Both www.BessieStringfieldBiography.com and internet extracts from Ann Ferrar’s book “Hear Me Roar” (NY: Crown, 1996) were used as resources for this article, and we would recommend Ann’s work for further reading on the life of Bessie Stringfield.

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“I come from a family of grassroots civil-servants,” she says when I ask her about her early influences. “My mother had great compassion for helping vulnerable groups – particularly women and children. These humanist seeds were planted in me long ago.” From her studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to working as a cleaner in an Edinburgh hospital – where she got first-hand experience of the issues faced by low-income groups – she is passionate about equality. “I advocate tirelessly for these groups because I understand the issues,” she says.

After her studies, Dorcas worked as a Mental Health Adviser for AFRUCA (Africans Unite Against Child Abuse), a charity which was formed as a response to the Victoria Climbié case in 2000. Victoria, an 8 year old Ivorian girl, who’d been suffering severe abuse without appropriate social-care intervention, was eventually murdered by her guardians in 2000. The case was widely reported by the media. Dorcas says it “struck a code”, resulting in much-needed change across care systems, and raising questions on the role that religion and culture plays in shaping cultural practises. At AFRUCA, Dorcas explored African cultural practises such as FGM, Human Trafficking, Witchcraft Branding and child chastisement. “Working here shaped my understanding of advocacy in terms of looking at what makes policies successful at grassroots levels.”

Despite the notable health improvements in the African population in the last decade, the continent still faces enormous healthcare challenges. “There is no health without mental health,” Dorcas explains. “Physical health is intrinsically tied to mental health and in low-income countries these challenges are compounded by poverty, poor access to healthcare, and poor healthcare systems. Mental health across the globe receives very little recognition and funding – and this is even more the case in low-income countries.”

But Dorcas says she is always moved by the resilience of people who are so disproportionately burdened with such challenges. “I think communities in high-income countries could learn so much from those who have so little – they’d do well to adopt their models of social and cultural cohesion.”

Dorcas was tasked with evaluating the African Ebola crisis of 2013-16; she describes it as one of the most striking epidemics of our time. “Viruses don’t respect borders,” she says, acknowledging the speed that the disease travelled across countries. “I learned – more than ever – that the best of our scientific knowledge is not complete without a robust understanding of local cultural practices. I also learned that communities have capacity to mobilise themselves, even when governments fail to do so. And it’s important that Africans take ownership of our own challenges, and provide better healthcare for the African population. Equally, we need to credit the African response to the Ebola crisis – Nigeria was Ebola-free before the U.S.A. was.”

Dorcas is currently working on mental health interventions in London for young people and families involved in gangs, and also young girls affected by sexual exploitation through gang culture. Her current research supports adolescents who often have high exposure to trauma, and are often stigmatised and/or isolated from their wider society. “My work takes a broader approach to understanding the push-and-pull factors that drive young people in and out of gangs,” she says and notes that a significant proportion of young people involved in gangs come from minority backgrounds and suffer high levels of poverty. “My role challenges the notion of ‘Hard to Reach’ groups. It adapts culturally-adjusted methods of outreach engagement – we’ve taken the clinic to the streets, for example. It’s our priority to keep young people safe from knife-crime and to keep young girls safe from sexual exploitation.”

I wish my mother were alive to see the seeds she planted. I miss her dearly. I blame her entirely for my restlessness in seeking a better tomorrow.

Winning the Zimbabwean International Women Humanitarian Award in 2016 was one of Dorcas’ career highlights, and she notes the responsibility that comes with it to mentor others. She was also named Nursing Standard Nurse of the Year 2015 for her work with young people involved in gangs. “The real heroes of that award are the young vulnerable people I look after – people who are striving for a better and safer life, often with little acknowledgement,” she says.

But it isn’t just the awards that inspire her; she loves the arts. “I believe the arts have an important place in people’s recovery and well being,” she says. “What would it mean for patients in a mental health hospital to hear a few lines of poetry or the thump piano?” She feels the arts ground her, and often looks to women in this field for inspiration. “I love Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie’s writing,” she says. “I remember meeting her briefly once, and she said to me: ‘We need to hear about Zimbabwe. Keep writing about Zimbabwe’. And Arundhati Roy – her pen knows no boundaries. She’s unapologetic about advocating for the voiceless, for the forgotten groups in her society. I take a leaf out of her book.”

©The Heroine Collective 2017 – Present, All Rights Reserved.

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