Kenya: ‘It’s a call to action, not a time to rest. We need to keep up the fight’
As a woman dressed in mid-thigh jean shorts hops on to a music-blaring, graffiti-covered bus in Nairobi city centre, the conductor gropes her and hollers: “You’re looking sexy, baby.”
The woman calls him out angrily, and hopes other passengers will come to her defence, but she is met with disapproving looks instead. Some men on the bus tut loudly, muttering under their breaths that she invited the unwanted touching given how “inappropriately” she was dressed. Others act as if nothing happened, and a few seem amused.
This scene, captured in the Kenyan illustrator Nancy “Chelwek” Cherwon’s graphic story, may be uncomfortably familiar to many Kenyan female commuters, including Chelwek herself, who has faced harassment while using public transport.
Called The Last Stand, the story explores how women’s bodies have become battlegrounds where everyday sexism plays out, and how Kenyan women have reasserted their agency by using their bodies as a tool of feminist resistance, both traditionally and in modern times.
The short comic, which covers a history of women’s protests in Kenya, highlights important moments and figures in the country’s feminist resistance movement, who challenged the gender norms of their times.
“I wanted to show that the struggle didn’t start now,” says Chelwek. Women still navigate suffocating social norms every day, and that can be deflating, she says, so tracking the evolution of the social and political battles women have fought across the ages was important: they were the milestones of change, the lifeblood of resistance movements.
Chelwek, 31, grew up in Nairobi as the middle child in a family of five. She never quite felt as if she fitted in at home or in school. At home, her parents chided her for her excessive interest in art, pressuring her to focus on more traditional academic interests, while at school she often got kicked out of class for being disruptive or distracted. Her interests lay elsewhere.
“I was afraid to be myself for the longest time,” says Chelwek. At university, without her family’s full knowledge, she pursued an illustration degree and learned graffiti from some of Kenya’s most prolific street artists. She now works as a full-time illustrator and muralist and hopes to use her art for social change.
Chelwek’s contribution to a new book called Feminism in Pictures – a collection of illustrated stories focused on women’s rights around the world – begins by highlighting the often underplayed role of women played in Kenya’s fight for independence from colonial rule, and concentrates on the role of Muthoni wa Kirima, one of the few active female fighters in the anti-colonial movement. The imagery captures the important symbolism of Kirima, and the times: Kirima eating soil (a gesture of the fighters’ oath to fight for their land), leading an ambush and wearing the trademark dreadlocks she vowed not to cut until she saw the benefits of independence. She only cut them in 2022, a year before her death.
The short story progresses to other pivotal moments in Kenyan feminist history: in the early 1990s, when mothers of political prisoners stripped naked in Nairobi’s Uhuru park to protest against their detention. The wilful public nudity of the elderly women, which carried heavy cultural symbolism, conveyed their opposition to government action at a time of heightened political repression, and fended off police attacks. The area they launched the protests soon came to be known as “freedom corner”.
The story jumps forward to depictions of more recent feminist developments, including the #MyDressMyChoice movement, when thousands of women marched to demonstrate against a wave of incidents in which women were stripped on the streets in broad daylight over claims of “indecent” dressing, and one woman who was filmed being raped on public transport. The string of violent public abuse sparked widespread online and street protests, and the pressure led to arrests, changes in the law and greater public condemnation of such attacks.
Chelwek’s book ends on a sombre-yet-hopeful note, which she illustrates through the contrasts of progress. A new, more inclusive constitution, with affirmative action provisions for women that have yet to be fully implemented; cases of femicide alongside vigils commemorating those losses, and more safe houses set up in response. Inequality persists, though a mother and daughter can play, rather than protest, at Uhuru Park.
“It’s a call to action – it’s not time to rest,” says Chelwek. “Progress is happening but we need to keep up the fight.”
CK
Brazil: ‘We can’t talk about feminism without talking about race and class. In that sense, Sônia is a feminist icon’
Sônia Guajajara made history this year after being named Brazil’s first ever minister for Indigenous peoples by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The daughter of illiterate parents, Guajajara overcame socioeconomic, racial and gender barriers to rise to national and international prominence and represent historically marginalised Indigenous Brazilians at the highest levels of government.
“Sônia Guajajara is someone I admire immensely,” says the illustrator Helô D’Angelo, who chose to celebrate the Indigenous activist and politician in her contribution to Feminism in Pictures.
“One of the most important issues in feminism is intersectionality, particularly in countries like Brazil where the majority of the population is racialised, whether Black, Indigenous, or part of traditional [mixed-race] communities. We can’t talk about feminism without talking about these other issues, like race and class,” says the São Paulo-born artist. “In this sense, Sônia can be seen as a feminist icon.”
D’Angelo always knew she wanted to be an illustrator. She remembers drawing as a child with her father and devouring comic books from an early age. “I always loved reading the cartoons in the newspaper. I wouldn’t understand them but I loved them,” she says.
But it wasn’t until she went to university that D’Angelo began engaging with issues such as gender inequality and women’s rights, and addressing these ideas in her illustrations.
“As I started experiencing sexism and I studied more, as I started feeling angry with how the world is, I began drawing comic strips about it,” says the 29-year-old, who considers herself a feminist and an activist. She is particularly committed to the campaign for the decriminalisation of abortion, which in Brazil is illegal except in cases of rape; danger to the mother’s life; or if the foetus has anencephaly, a fatal brain disorder.
D’Angelo’s work more broadly focuses on human rights, mental health, and her own experience as a woman.
As well as having published five comic books – on topics ranging from the coronavirus pandemic to toxic masculinity – D’Angelo, who has a degree in journalism, creates political cartoons and covers news in comic form. She tries to bring a didactic element to her work, usually with a touch of humour.
“Today I work to raise awareness, present information, open up a conversation for someone who maybe wouldn’t think about these things. And comic strips are a really good medium for that,” she says.
This approach underpinned her comic on Guajajara. The profile, based on an interview, puts the minister’s personal story of struggle and success within the wider context of the fight for Indigenous rights in Brazil, which suffered violent setbacks under the Jair Bolsonaro administration.
“Their fight is a struggle for land, for the protection of the environment, for the conservation of their cultures and histories, it’s an anti-colonial struggle,” says D’Angelo. “Brazilians and the whole world need to be familiar with these narratives.”
CM
Turkey: ‘Violence against women is so widespread, we are all exposed to it’
Selen Sarikaya Eren did not know much about the landmark Istanbul convention on preventing violence against women, until a presidential decree announced Turkey’s withdrawal in March 2021. The agreement, which Turkey signed a decade before, wasn’t in the news much until the controversial exit.
The decision to pull out of the treaty was widely condemned by global human rights groups, and sparked protests across the country.
As women gathered to protest, Sarikaya Eren, who lives in Italy, learned through online campaigns that the treaty was crucial for women in a country where femicide and domestic violence continue unabated.
For her contribution to Feminism in Pictures, Sarikaya Eren initially planned to focus on femicide but realised that her illustrations could make the agreement more accessible to others.
“Illustrations can open up new horizons for people and they can take people by surprise through beauty,” she says.
A female lawyer featured in the story says “leaving the convention would only embolden men to turn to violence”, as feminist organisations mobilise and protesters face police.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has for years prioritised traditional family values, casting women as mothers above all else. Conservative groups lobbied against the convention by claiming that the treaty promoted homosexuality and threatened Turkish families. Two years on, this attitude was central during Erdogan’s election campaign when he targeted LGBTQ+ people.
“Violence against women is so widespread and we are all exposed to it,” Sarikaya Eren says.
According to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, 1,190 women have been killed since 2021, including suspicious deaths. Women also experience other forms of violence, physical and psychological, at home and outside.
Sarikaya Eren struggled with how to depict murdered women. She considered drawing a victim or a family receiving the horrible news but opted instead for abstraction. In one box, she placed a young woman wearing a graduation cap, who then ended up on a protest sign as a victim of femicide.
“Sometimes directly showing a painful fact doesn’t create the right effect. So I tried balance: showing how painful and unjust it is but without triggering anyone,” she says.
Sarikaya Eren wanted to raise awareness beyond Turkey about how the treaty protects women. She cited the murder of an Italian woman in November to point at a global issue with conservative groups in various countries moving against the treaty.
Sarikaya Eren, 30, discovered her love of art as a child, “obsessively” drawing characters from the Japanese anime series Sailor Moon. She contributes drawings to Lazy Women, an online platform where her illustrations accompany essays on Turkish elections, urban planning, and the choice to be child-free.
As an artist and a doctoral student of political science focusing on art in social movements, she is interested in the “instinct to create” while bearing witness to social issues.
“You will never walk alone,” says Sarikaya Eren’s characters, a slogan of Turkey’s “brave, tenacious, resilient” feminist movement and also the title of her illustration.
“I wanted to end in a hopeful place”, she says, “where women stand together to protect and empower each other.”
ZB
• Feminism in Pictures is published by the Global Unit for Feminism and Gender Democracy, a division of the Heinrich Böll Foundation
