Resilients

The Black continent is a perpetual reincarnation, surfacing into limitless rhizomes. But it is mutating…This is somehow its resiliency… The African women, who have so many faces and realities, surely are one of its mots beautiful expressions. In them, are concentrated, both the strengths and the splits of the continent. Its retrogressions and its modernizations. Whereas Africa has been so many times profaned, … They are there.

Standing. Upright. Surviving. The sex role defined for the women in Africa changes according to where shedwells : city or village. Between rurality and city-dwelling, the profiles evolve. The city is liberating and the countries bear huge metropolis in their cores. So, women are freer there and they escape the village and its customs, considered retrograde. Break up the link ? Resilients. Should the traditions end up in escheat ?

« Resilients » show that lineage is inextinguishable. Clothed with their mothers’s and grandmothers’s ornaments, they reveal legacies. Inheritance. The Black women, revealed in their ancestrality through their photographies, demonstrate the importance of their cultural heritage. In them, there is the memory of an aesthetic tradition, which makes their sap, their roots…

Text by Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette Writer and Sociologist.