Presentation

Who are we ?

We are an afrofeminist collective created in 2014, connected to revolutionary struggles for liberation. We organise in double ‘non-mixité’:

- Between cis and trans women and non-binary people

- Between Black people- African and Afrodescendants, from the African continent and Afro diaspora.

Our afrofeminism is a political and collective response to the racist, heteropatriarchal and capitalist system. We consider ourselves part of the legacies of Black women and feminists who fought for emancipation and liberation, by contributing to the development of feminist thought in France, in Africa, in the Caribbean and in the African diaspora as a whole. Mwasi is not and will never be tied to a political party. As a revolutionary collective, we don’t believe in a simple reform of our institutions, but we believe in a deep, radical and complete transformation of our society, through collective struggle.

We define ourselves as inheriting from the movements which have preceded us in France and beyond.

Mwasi is an association defined by French law ‘1901’.

What we are fighting against

Mwasi fights for liberation, self-determination and for the autonomy of Black cis and trans women and Black non binary people.

Black cis and trans women and non binary people are at the intersection of several forms of State violence and systemic oppressions: racism, sexism, LGBTphobias. Working class Black cis and trans women and non binary people are exploited by capitalism, as precarious workers working in difficult conditions. If they have migrated, they also experience the constant endangering of their lives by the French government, through hostile and criminalising policies and discourse, especially towards people from the African continent. In French territories, Black cis and trans women and non binary people pay the price of colonial policies, of polluting and destructive capitalism, inflation, and land grabs by rich people and corporations.

They all endure, in multiple ways, the violence of a State who refuses to recognise the historical, continued and voluntary nature of this violence. In healthcare, in education, in prison, on the street, at work, at home, racist heteropatriarchy limits our lives, our freedoms, our rights, our autonomy.

‘From sharing our lived experience, and as women, as Black women, we realised that the history of struggle, in our countries and through the history of immigration, is a history where we are invisibilised, falsified. Were brought to light the presence of women, the role of women in anticolonial struggles, their role in the resistance, their place after independence movements in political parties, the human trafficking of Black women sold to peasants in the Lozere region of France, the forced sterilisation of Black women in the US, in the West Indies and French Caribbean, and all the violence we experienced in the name of so-called ‘traditions’.

What we want

For us, our shared history as Afrodescendants, and our collective experience of racist heteropatriarchy and State violence, also means that we have a shared destiny of liberation.

Mwasi fights for a better knowledge of this history, for more production of knowledge and art by Black cis and trans women and non binary people on their own stories and cultures.

Mwasi fights for equality in rights for all Black people, their right to self-define, to dispose of their own body as they see fit.

Mwasi is an abolitionist collective which fights for prisons and police to disappear, as they form a system which protects the crimes of the rich, enables sexual violence, and on the other hand criminalises, surveils, kills, maims in mass Black people, racialised people, migrants and sex workers. We fight for transformative justice which centers and respects victims and supports their healing process.

Mwasi is an anticapitalist collective because, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore said: ‘There is no good capitalism. There is no capitalism that is not racist. There is no capitalism which doesn’t produce and reproduce gender inequalities. There is no capitalism that doesn’t exhaust the energies and resources of the human and non-human world.’

Mwasi fights for shared, collective economies, with mutual aid and solidarity at their center.

Mwasi fights for human, dignified, good working conditions, but at the same time decentering work and its ableist and exploitative structures, from our lives.

Mwasi fights for the recognition and valuing of the invisible work that is systematically assigned to women- domestic work, child care and caring for older people- and how white and rich women delegate this work to poor, racialised, Black and migrant women.

Mwasi fights for access to good and stable housing for all Black people.

Mwasi fights for environmental justice and climate justice which centers the struggles of people from the global South, who are first and foremost impacted by the climate crises, and we fight for the acknowledgement of the responsibility of Western imperialism and colonial policies in this crisis.

We consider ourselves allies of the people who are fighting for independence and sovereignty in the face of imperialism- in Palestine, in Kanaky, in all territories occupied by white supremacy’s forces.

Mwasi fights for local and global reparations which would give access to land, to natural resources, to economic resources, to political power and to healing resources (such as access to the mother tongue, access to history, to culture, to care, to rest…) for people affected by slavery and the colonial history and present of France.

What we organise

Actions: collects, demonstrations…

Training: with our afrofeminist school EKO

Casual spaces for feminist conversations: afrofem cafés, meetings around a certain theme, cultural outings, podcasts

The Nyansapo European Black Feminist Festival: a space for afrofeminists to meet and work together in solidarity, since 2017