Reimagining Africa: Debunking de facto Depictions

As a visual artist navigating multiple cultural and geographical terrains, I regard my environment as a boundless canvas that offers infinite opportunities to observe, interpret, and reimagine the layered complexities of modern life. My practice is rooted in the desire to challenge reductive narratives and reclaim agency through visual storytelling.

Historically, the portrayal of African women has been heavily mediated by the colonial lens, constructed to serve the sensibilities of the Western gaze. These depictions often conflated identity with burden, presenting women as stoic figures, monumental in scale, cradling infants on their backs and balancing loads on their heads. Such imagery was not only reductive but deliberate in its othering. It fostered a sense of moral superiority or distant sympathy in the viewer, reinforcing stereotypes that cast African women as emblems of toil and endurance.

Where the male gaze has long commodified the female body for pleasure, the Western gaze has objectified African women as symbols of struggle, stripped of individuality, nuance, and modernity. This framework persists subtly even today.

Yet our lives are not monolithic. Yes, we labour, but we also dance, create, innovate, wander, indulge. We sip lattes in Manhattan cafés, navigate the globe, love extravagantly, and exist in a state of glorious complexity. My work seeks to render visible these dimensions often omitted or ignored, to show that joy, leisure, sophistication, and agency are as much a part of our identity as resilience.