PUBLIC LECTURE
by Cluster fellows Carine Bahanag and Rose Ndengue

On 20th December the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence presents a public lecture by its Artist Fellow Carine Bahanag and Cameroonian historian and socio-politician scholar-activist Rose Ndengue. Both Bahanag and Ndengue will hold a lecture and subsequently talk about details of their collaboration. Together they are currently working on the graphic novel “Anlu”, a project that is part of Bahanag’s project as a Cluster fellow. The creative team behind the book include Bahanag and Ndengue who are in charge of the script, as well as the illustrators Reine Dibussi and Malvina Barra aka Edzin.

Rose Ndengue: “Gender and citizenship in Africa: a black feminist decolonial perspective on Cameroon case”

Very few African social science studies on politics use gender as a critical tool of analysis. Yet, gender analysis combined with a more dynamic and evidenced-based approach to the public sphere, can reveal how the expression of African women’s citizenship takes many forms, as illustrated by the analysis of Cameroonian women's mobilizations over time.
These women, relegated to the margins of socio-economic and political life since colonization, have developed an agency that enables them to reclaim an indomitable and emancipatory citizenship.”

About Rose Ndengue:
Rose Ndengue is a Cameroonian historian and socio-politician scholar-Activist. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Glendon, York University, and is involved with several feminist organizations. She works and teaches on issues of Gender and politics, Black feminisms in a transnational perspective, African studies, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. Her work has been published in several academic journals: Journal of Women History, Sociétés et Politiques, Le mouvement social, Genre, sexualités et société, Outre-Mers: Revue d'histoire; and in a collective book edited by Felix Germain and Silyane Larcher, Black French women and the struggle for equality, 1848-2016.

As an activist, Rose has co-founded many platforms/organizations like the Lyon-based Afrofeminist collective Sawtche, the former Cameroonian feminist coordination, as well as the transnational feminist Association Femmes Actanteshe and the Montreal Based organization, Feminist Solidarity Committee with the Global South.

Carine Bahanag: "The graphic novel ‘ANLU’: a militant artistic project on the participation of Cameroonian women in the war of independence"

In 2030, Anlu, a young Afropean girl who faces harassment at school, goes, accompanied by her best friend, to visit the Museum of Black Feminism and other movements for African and Afro-descendant women. While browsing the Museum’s collections, Anlu comes across an exhibition focused on the political activism of rural Cameroonian women and their participation in the independence struggles. By learning about this little-known part of feminist history, she also discovered the origin and meaning of her own first name: Anlu, a term defining a kind of political mobilization specific to women in the North-West region of Cameroon. She then notices that she is linked to the long and diverse history of the black feminist struggle.

About Carine Bahanag:
From 2014 to 2016, Carine Bahanag wrote and directed three musicals for children as part of her Vacances en Cadence project, artistic workshops open free of charge to children from the working class Nkolndongo district (Yaoundé, Cameroon), with limited access to art. In 2018, with a Bachelor’s degree in organizational communication and a Master’s in Performing Arts, she began a doctoral thesis in anthropology on the male recovery of women's dances from southern Cameroon in the process of patrimonialization. In 2019, she joined the team behind Reine Dibussi’s children’s and science-fiction comic Mulatako, about difference, feminism and self-confidence. She wrote the script for volumes 2 (Afiri éditions 2021), 3 and 4 of the series (scheduled for 2024 and 2025). In 2020, together with Reine Dibussi, she co-founded AFIRI Studio, a publishing house and graphic studio based in France, specializing in African and Afrodescendant-inspired illustrated content. In 2021, she joined the co-founding team of the Coordination féministe Camerounaise, a coalition of associations aiming to strengthen the Cameroonian feminist movement. In June 2023, she co-founded the collectif féministe 1931 – a working group focused on the transmission of African feminist knowledge, whose mission is to contribute to the social and political revolution necessary for the advent of a more just, equitable and egalitarian society in Cameroon and on the African continent.