HALF THE SKY (2020)

Amina Kadous | Jim Joel Nyakaana |Rosie Olang’ Odhiambo | Anna Karima Wane

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Half the Sky (2020) is a video work exploring the oft-erased role of women in pre and postcolonial political struggles, while simultaneously centering the quotidian labor performed by African women. Set to Miriam Makeba’s Kilimanjaro, this montage moves through different geographies, and generations, highlighting the role of women in the cross-continental goal towards freedom.

 

Almost two minutes into the video work; in an excerpt of musician and activist Miriam Makeba addressing the United Nations in 1964, she says,

Would you not resist if you had no rights in your own country?

 

As participants in the research and context-based studio, we have each have pulled from our local contexts, identifying women from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, Egypt, Guinea and South Africa who have marked our histories, through their writing, singing, activism, and their daily labor. We have chosen to showcase fragments of found footage, photographs, and soundbites about Stella Nyanzi, Safina Kazem, Bibi Titi Mohammed, Miriam Makeba, Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, the Kenyan women of the Release political Prisoners movement of 1992,(among others)

 

The formal structure of this video work is inspired by artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa’s concept of Black vocal intonation; which refers to the ways filmic movements can function in a manner that approximates black vocal intonation particularly in music; an approach that is poised in the idea that music is the height of black expressive culture. In choosing to work with Miriam Makeba’s Kilimanjaro, we are attentive to her rich and extensive history of Pan-African activism throughout her career, and use this thread to weave together multiple narratives explicating the ways African women have and continue to strive for a common goal: freedom.