The Aba Women’s Rebellion in 1929, also known as the Women’s War, marked a significant development in anti-colonial resistance achieved by women in Nigeria. Following a period of restriction upon women’s participation in the political sphere, as well as newly imposed taxes, this nonviolent protest was the first major organisation of peasant women in West Africa and it is seen largely as a prelude to the later nationalist movements in Africa.
When Pêro Vaz de Caminha arrived in Brazil on the 22nd of April 1500 aboard Pedro Alvares Cabral’s voyage of ‘discovery’, he was awestruck. The letter he wrote to the Portuguese King Manuel I is in stark contrast to those written by other explorers of the period.
Great strides have been made towards stronger representations of queerness both in law and in the media, yet further work is needed to achieve a more intersectional approach. Whilst television programmes like Heartstopper are fantastic, and should be celebrated for their ability to show queer joy, they point towards a trend of representing dominant white narratives of queerness.
Hierarchies of morality were used by the British to justify colonial intervention across India. By depicting Indians as ‘immoral’, the state further entrenched binaries between the colonized and the colonizer. Such entrenchment paved the way for Western thought to be dominated by the perception of empire as a civilizing mission.
Given the current debate about the monitoring of the press , Emma Slater examines the history of free speech and press censorship.
