Special Note: Throughout this post we will use African/Muslim interchangeably, not to hold Islam up as special or protected, but to help the reader understand the basis for why attacks were launched against the African community. While Islam is the religion of many groups in Sweden; when violence is involved, especially violence against women, it is usually the African community that gets criminalized.
There have been many things happening to African women here in Sweden. The crisis of imperialism has deepened the oppression felt by our people and there haven’t been any organizations responding to these issues effectively. The feminist movements have attempted to co-opt the issues felt by African women to prevent us from looking at the primary contradictions caused by the State.
They have a grip on the minds of the masses and distorted the struggle we need to make.
Despite this, however, many sisters are looking for answers to all of the contradictions we face as colonized people. They can see that feminism does not have the analysis or the capacity to fight for African women whose conditions are worsened as a result of being colonially oppressed.
For these reasons, the APSP in Sweden has decided to focus on building ANWO in Sweden to give leadership to African women who are struggling to make sense of their conditions.
We began our organizing by directly taking down the feminist narrative used to slander the African (specifically Somali) community.
On Sep 20th Sia and I attended/crashed a feminist event that was hosted by the State, in the form of police, politicians and other petty-bourgeois forces. Their agenda was and is to attack Muslim/African men in the name of “women’s rights”.
The meeting was held in an African/Muslim community in Stockholm, called Rinkeby.
There wasn’t any notice given to the African/Muslim community about the meeting, even though the meeting intended to “discuss and solve the issues” of the African community. There were 1 or 2 Africans who represented the African petty -bourgeoisie in attendance, but they were not there to represent issues of the community.
ANWO’s goals and objectives for this meeting was to:
- Expose the hypocrisy of the feminist agenda to the African/Muslim community
- To let the imperialist state know that we will resist in an organized manner whenever they come in to our communities
- To find possible new forces to build with ANWO and our coming campaign around the issue of the State kidnapping African children
Below is an account of what happened (video included):
The key presenter was Amineh Kakabaveh, who is a well-known Kurdish feminist and “anti-racist”.
This event was about promoting feminism by trying to see a “common factor” when it comes to the oppression of “all women/women in general”.It is important to mention that it was held in the Muslim/African community because they wanted to talk about hederskultur (honors culture) since it is supposed to be a “Muslim problem” which it is not; it is a primarily Kurdish problem in Sweden.
This is a very controversial statement in Sweden, but we say it because the state uses honors culture as a way to attack the whole Muslim/African community, with these discussions or attacks are never directed at the community where this behavior is exhibited most – the Kurdish community. They always bring it to the African community.
After the panelist gave their presentations, ANWO forces stood up to make our comments. We wanted to clearly show where we stand as African Internationalist, exposing the hypocrisy of the feminist agenda and how it relates to the colonized woman on a day-to-day basis.
The first comment was made by sister Inaa where she went to Amineh’s Facebook page to expose the contradictions of Amineh. Amineh had, at one point, spread nasty propaganda about Muslim men and Islam as a whole. These are one of the reasons Muslims don’t respect this woman.
When sister Inaa started talking, the leading committee rushed to silence her by saying, ” your 3 min are over,” which couldn’t be further from the truth since she had just started speaking (1:01).
Earlier in the event, a leading committee member stated that , ” men of the third world have not learned how to control themselves sexually” / ” how all the institutions and major companies even in the African/Muslim communities are patriarchal.”
When I had chance to speak, however, I disputed this statement and offered the African Internationalist explanation; that what was being identified as patriarchal was in fact white power institutions who deepen crisis in oppressed communities and then come to chastise us for our response.
So I said that if someone wants to come to the Muslim/African community they can talk about the real issues we face which is mainly the police harassment on our youth (2:31).
I also mentioned that if they want to talk about the oppression of women, we all know it originated in Europe and that it has been imposed on us because we are colonized (3:22).
That was when some people(Africans and Muslims) in the back of the audience clapped their hands in unity with the statement.
I also mentioned why we don’t call ourselves feminists.
Sia gave her comments following mine, saying that if they want to come to our communities and “help” they can talk about the real issues that the masses are faced with, like gentrification/housing/police/
unemployment/the kidnapping of Somali children by the state/ cockroaches in the houses etc. She also said that hederskultur is disgusting and that ANWO can show solidarity with Kurdish women, BUT not to say that all Muslims have this issue, asking the question, “since when did Somali girls get killed because they are socializing with their friends, you cant say that!”
So after our comments Amineh wanted to attack us by saying that it was racist of us to say it is a Kurdish problem and that we had a anti-feminist stance – which is like a slur in Sweden.
We left the event and rallied outside with placards as ANWO, telling her to leave our communities and the masses approached us and showed huge solidarity with our statement.
After the event, SÄPO (similar to the FBI) had to take her out of the event and out of the community.
This video was posted in a Facebook group and there were no opponents but only people who united with our statement.
As a result, ANWO has been invited to 2-panel discussions by organizations who heard our statement.
People were saying things such as, “the sisters put words on everything I’ve been thinking about” and ” they said everything I was afraid to say”
We want to deepen the political understanding in our communities and call on people to organize with us for this coming campaign.
We see one of our missions moving forward is to stand up at different events to expose the truth so that we can continue to win African communities in Sweden to the position African Internationalism as a path to freedom.
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