Anticolonial Feminist Human Rights

This chapter, entitled “Anticolonial Feminist Human Right”, interrogates West African native traditions in respect to music and the historical specificity of gender coloniality in operation as part of the production and validation of British colonial governance. This chapter explores the antecedents of the human rights activism of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s pioneering Afrobeat as manifest in the anticolonial activism of Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Principal to the critical aspects of anticolonial feminism explored include the development of activist praxis of direct intervention and disruption of colonial oppression and its gender dimensions. The chapter details the past and present of anticolonial feminism in respect to the vehicle of Afrobeat and the feminist antecedent influences on its communicative action. Anticolonial feminism counterpropositions in public space and does so by interrupting the ideological (mis)tellings of entitlement to colonised land. Mobilising native activities deployed to counter-position colonised publics space, e.g. art and music festival situationism, these feminists generate “hacks of masculinist, hegemonic and colonial modernity” (Engelmann 2022: 34). Integral to this approach is a disquiet with the combined effect of the rationalisation of colonial power through Eurocentric Western colonial systems of knowledge, immersed and productive of universal truth claims and dichotomous oppositional antinomies, which eternally position Africa as the lesser aspect of the simplistic binary. Similar practices include the privatisation of land and the enforcement of copyright law, a colonial logic “that has been implemented by (settler) colonial governments around the world to appropriate Indigenous lands” (Emard and Nelson 2021: 1048). Culminating in a critical theory analysis of Fela! the Broadway and National Theatre musical, the chapter argues that anticolonial feminists criticise these practices of the commodification of West African culture for operating through the reinforced ascription of patriarchy in terms of gender-based racialised hierarchies of differentiation.