Unfinished Freedom: The Continuity of Colonial Violence without Accountability

Across African and European societies, Black women continue to face disproportionate levels of violence, discrimination, and institutional neglect. These harms directly undermine their bodily autonomy, their socio-economic rights, their public visibility, and their access to justice. Crucially, they also erode Black women's political and economic agency: colonial administrations systematically displaced women from positions of authority, codified their legal dependence through the "wifisation of citizenship" and engineered labor regimes that excluded them from waged work while exploiting their unpaid labor. These harms are not isolated incidents but contemporary expressions of long-standing colonial narratives and that constructed Black women as hypersexual, available, excessive, and morally deficient. These narratives once justified sexual exploitation, reproductive control, economic marginalization, and the treatment of Black women as objects to be governed rather than subjects with political and economic rights. Today, the same logics continue to shape today's media coverage, public policy, healthcare practices, and social attitudes.

Recent evidence reveals how deeply these patterns are embedded. For instance, studies in both the United Kingdom and the United States reveal that Black women are significantly more likely than white women to face online harassment, with some reports indicating rates up to 84 percent higher. The digital hostility echoes broader structural inequities that extend into reproductive health. In the United Kingdom, for example, Black women are up to four times more likely to die during childbirth than white women, and nearly half report that their pain, concerns, or symptoms in labor are dismissed or minimized. Across Europe and Africa, research continues to document reproductive injustices, discriminatory maternal healthcare, persistent policing of Black women's sexuality, motherhood, digital abuse, etc. These ongoing violations are made possible by a consistent failure of accountability. Historically, sexual violence, forced labor, and reproductive coercion under colonial rule were documented but rarely punished. Today, institutional inquiries into racialized maternal mortality, gender-based violence, and discrimination often acknowledge harm yet stop short of structural change. This patterned non-accountability allows institutions to appear responsive while preserving the logic that produces harm.

The Unfinished Freedom project addresses these harms at their roots. It recognizes that violence against Black women is sustained not only through laws and policies, but through the representational and ideological systems that shape who Black women are understood to be, what their bodies signify, and whose suffering is treated as worthy of public concern. Genuine transformation requires shifting these underlying frameworks. It requires changing the stories societies tell about Black women, strengthening systems of accountability, and rebuilding structures of justice and care so that Black women's experiences are finally recognized, protected, and valued.

To achieve this, the initiative brings together three interconnected pillars: 

A 6‑month study mapping how colonial representations of Black women have persisted from the era of empire into contemporary European and African institutions. The research project will document women's experiences and society's perceptions of them in 4 former colonial powers (France, Belgium, the UK and Germany) and their former colonies (Senegal, DRC, Kenya and Namibia). The research traces these stereotypes across public policy, healthcare, migration systems, media, and everyday life, demonstrating how historical ideas about Black women's sexuality, labour, and maternity continue to shape concrete forms of violence and discrimination today.

Output: 1 Research report in English and French.

A four‑month season of the Disrupting the Colonial Script podcast will bring research findings to a broad public audience. Through conversations with activists, artists, scholars, and policymakers, the podcast will unpack the report's insights, platform Black women's expertise, and spark cross‑regional dialogue on how to dismantle these persistent colonial narratives. Output: 6 episodes of the podcast "Disrupting the Colonial Script" about the results of the report with a feminist guest (activist, researcher, political decision-maker, artist, etc.).

Episode 1 - Colonial Shadows - In partnership with Liberation Alliance Africa

Theme: colonial stereotypes, hypersexualization, submissiveness, "over fertility" narratives.

From colonial-era photography to modern digital platforms, the representation of Black women has been marked by hypersexualization, infantilization, and objectification. The research shows the historical construction of Black women as bodies "available at will," which continues today in global media ecosystems. These representations reinforce harmful stereotypes, shape public imagination, and influence policy responses to Black women.

Episode 2 - Politics of the Womb (in French) - In partnership with Tant que je serai noire

Theme: Reproductive control, medical racism, and the governance of Black women's bodies.

Control of Black women's fertility through forced sterilization, abortion policies, population management, and policing of maternity has been central to colonial governance and persists today. Colonial administrations constructed Black women as "over-fertile," biologically different, and in need of regulation. These logics were reinforced by racist medical beliefs, including the idea that Black women were less sensitive to pain, physically stronger, and therefore suitable subjects for experimentation, neglect, or coercive interventions. These stereotypes did not disappear with the end of colonial rule. They continue to shape contemporary healthcare systems, contributing to maternal mortality disparities, dismissal of Black women's pain, obstetric violence, and unequal access to reproductive and maternal care. From sterilization scandals in Réunion and Mayotte to broader global inequalities in maternal health, the episode explores how colonial medical ideologies continue to influence policy, practice, and everyday clinical encounters.

Episode 3 - Beauty, Skin & Power (in French) -  In partnership with KIMPAVITA

Theme: Eurocentric beauty norms, harmful beauty products, colorism, fashion exploitation

Eurocentric beauty norms like skin-lightening, hair politics, body‑shaming, and aesthetic hierarchies have roots in colonial ideologies of the "civilized" versus "primitive" body. As the podcast episode ideas show, harmful beauty industries, colorism, and global fashion exploitation continue to reproduce these logics today. This theme enables a conversation about autonomy, dignity, and the right to self‑representation.

Episode 4 - Economic Marginalization. In partnership with Nawi Afrifem Collective

Theme: The racialized and gendered devaluation of Black women's labor.

The exploitation of Black women's labor—domestic, agricultural, care-based, or in cultural and fashion industries—sits at the intersection of race, gender, and class. Colonial systems relied on cheap, feminized labor and constructed ideologies that justified economic extraction from Black women and girls. Contemporary manifestations such as the recruitment of young refugee women into exploitative modeling circuits or ongoing inequalities in pay, access to labor markets, and workplace protections illustrate the continuity of these patterns.

Episode 5 - Between War & Peace. In partnership with FEMNET

Theme: Sexual violence of colonial armies, coercion, impunity

Sexual violence was not incidental but central to colonial rule. Soldiers, administrators, and settlers exerted power through coercion, assault, and impunity, including the taking of women hostage to force labor productivity. These patterns persist in militarized policing, border regimes, and wartime contexts in the present-day countries under study.

Episode 6 - Transcontinental Feminist Solidarity. In partnership with Federal Institute of Goiás

Theme: Afro-diasporic solidarity and global Black feminist movements

Across continents, Black women have never resisted in isolation. From anti-colonial struggles to contemporary movements for racial, gender, and climate justice, transnational solidarities have been central to challenging systems of oppression. These solidarities connect struggles across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the diaspora, revealing shared histories of colonialism and shared strategies of resistance. This episode centers contemporary forms of Afro-diasporic organizing, with a particular focus on the One Million Women's March in Brazil, a historic mobilization of Black women that African Futures Lab participated in. The march brought together women from across Brazil and the diaspora to demand racial, economic, environmental, and gender justice, demonstrating the political power of collective action across borders. By situating this moment within a longer history of Black feminist internationalism, the episode explores how solidarity travels across languages, geographies, and generations. It examines how transcontinental alliances are reshaping feminist agendas, building shared narratives, and advancing demands for reparations, dignity, and structural transformation.  

The six thematic threads of the season are drawn directly from the recurring socio‑historical patterns identified in the research project and across AfaLab's broader work. Across all eight countries studied, these patterns reveal consistent areas where Black women's bodies, labor, sexuality, and visibility have been regulated, exploited, or violently controlled.

These include:

• reproductive governance and population control

• economic exploitation and labor devaluation

• objectifying colonial and postcolonial representations

• beauty norms and the policing of Black women's bodies

• state, military, and border-related sexual violence

• transcontinental Black feminist solidarities and collective resistance

While the first five themes examine the mechanisms through which colonial logics continue to shape Black women's lives, the final theme focuses on how Black women have historically resisted and built political alliances across borders. From anti-colonial movements to contemporary Afro-diasporic mobilizations, transnational solidarities have been central to challenging racialized and gendered systems of domination.

Together, these themes offer a coherent framework that not only exposes the persistence of colonial representations and their material consequences, but also highlights the collective strategies, alliances, and movements through which Black women contest these structures and imagine alternative futures.  

Over seven months, Black women artists will produce new works that confront, reinterpret, and subvert colonial representations. Through artistic creation, the exhibition to be held in Paris intervenes directly at the level of imagery the very terrain on which these stereotypes were historically constructed. The event will be accompanied by a public round table and a short documentary video, ensuring the conversation reaches audiences across Africa, Europe, and beyond.

By combining rigorous research, public storytelling, and artistic transformation, this project offers a rare, multidimensional intervention into a centuries‑long problem. It not only exposes how colonial representations continue to harm Black women but also builds the public consciousness, cultural tools, and political momentum required to end these representations and the violence they enable. This initiative is ultimately about shifting power: restoring narrative authority to Black women, challenging deeply rooted systems of knowledge, and creating conditions for more just, equitable, and liberated futures across Africa and Europe.

Output: 1 exhibition; 1 round table and 1 short video (aftermovie) of the creative process and public event.