Renascenting Africa: debunking de facto depictions

As a visual artist who traverses multiple cultures and geographical zones, my surrounding environment has become a broad, blank canvass that gives me unlimited avenue and opportunity to capture and express, through my works, the vignettes of modern society.

Previously, the de facto depictions of the African woman have been formed and fashioned specifically for the colonial viewer; the Western gaze. And where the male gaze frames women as sexual objects for their pleasure, the Western gaze frames African women as foreign objects of pity and toil.

There was a deliberate "otherness" to our depictions; colossal and black, with babies on our backs and burdens on our heads. The viewer of such images may have inevitably felt a sense of righteousness in their pity for our travails or more banally, considered how different our lives must be from theirs.

Yes, we may carry babies on our backs and loads on our heads, but we also dance, and laugh, and travel, and explore, and sip overpriced lattes at cafes in Manhattan, and live and love. It is quite telling then, that even today, suffering is still largely the frame through which the West sees African women.