Women And Resistance

This episode profiles Luisa Diaz Diogo, Mozambique’s first woman Minister of Planning and Finance and first woman Prime Minister, in a wide-ranging conversation about nation-building under colonialism, war, structural adjustment, and recovery. 

She explains why economics is inseparable from liberation, and why peace must be funded, coordinated, and protected.

The conversation also connects her personal life to national his...

This episode centers on Cecile Fatiman, the Haitian mambo whose role in the Bois Caïman uprising helped ignite the Haitian Revolution. Adesoji Iginla and Aya as Cecile Fatiman use storytelling, history, and spiritual teaching to show how resistance lives in memory, ritual, ancestry, and joy.

We discuss how colonial power tried to erase African spiritual knowledge, why Vodou is a structured faith rather than a horror-story s...

This episode features host Adesoji Iginla and co-host Aya Fubara Eneli in conversation with Delphine Tsogo, who reflects on a life shaped by colonial partition, forest-based community knowledge, nursing, politics, and women’s organising in Cameroon. 

She traces how each stage of her life informed her work for women, children, and public welfare.

The conversation matters because Delphine does not separate pe...

This episode of Women and Resistance celebrates Roberta Flack’s life, music, and political commitments through a wide-ranging conversation that moves from childhood to global activism.
 
Adesoji Iginla frames Flack as an artist who never separated art from justice, and Aya embodies Flack, responding with stories about music, teaching, love, and the causes she backed throughout her career.

We discuss how her ...

This episode of Women in Resistance features Adesoji Iginla in conversation with Queen Nandi, with Aya Fubara Eneli joining the introduction and framing.

The discussion traces Nandi’s life from marginalisation and exile to her role as Queen Mother, centring the political, cultural, and personal costs of raising Shaka and resisting shame.

We discuss how women are written out of history, how colonial and patriarc...

This episode of Women in Resistance centers on Sarah Rector’s life story, from her birth in Indian Territory to the oil boom that made her a national curiosity. 

Sarah Rector and host Adesoji Iginla trace how race, law, land theft, and guardianship shaped her fortunes and the way her story was told. 

It matters because Rector’s experience shows how quickly wealth, Black childhood, and state contr...

In this episode, we explore the lives and legacies of remarkable women who defied odds, preserved their agency, and inspired future generations.

From an assassinated leader to the mathematician behind GPS, from a Montana mail carrier to a mother's decades-long fight for her stolen daughters — this special Women and Resistance season review brings together extraordinary women whose resistance took different shapes.

In this episode, Erna Brodber shares her journey from Jamaica to becoming a renowned writer and historian, emphasising the importance of community memory, cultural roots, and the creation of spaces for black liberation. She discusses her work in oral history, her novels, and the significance of reclaiming African and Caribbean histories.

Brodber turned oral histories into tools that challenge Western frameworks of time, hist...

Every time your phone finds your location, you're using math that a Black woman built in secret for four decades.

This week on Women and Resistance, Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. and Adesoji Iginla honour Dr Gladys Mae West, the mathematician whose satellite geodesy models became the mathematical backbone of the Global Positioning System.

Her work wasn't publicly recognised for more than 60 years after she started.

...

She was a teacher who became Rwanda's first and, to this day, only woman prime minister.

On this episode of Women and Resistance, Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq., embodies Agathe Uwilingiyimana in the first person, walking the host, Adesoji Iginla, through her rise from a village to the time she held constitutional power as Rwanda's acting head of state after President Habyarimana's assassination on 6 April 1994.

In this epi...

She sued her way into law school; let’s start there. Who, why, and where are the questions this week on Women and Resistance.

This week, Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq., embodies Florynce "Flo" Kennedy while Adesoji Iginla interviews her across a life built on one refusal. We trace her Kansas City girlhood to Womanhood.

In this captivating episode, we discover the fearless activism and powerful stories of Florence Kenne...

In this episode, Sylvia Del Villard shares her inspiring journey from Puerto Rico to international stages, emphasising the importance of cultural identity, resilience, and living authentically.

Discover how her life and work challenge stereotypes and celebrate Afro-Puerto Rican heritage.

Takeaways

*Cultural identity and Afro-Puerto Rican heritage
*Resilience and living authentically
*The role of music an...

In this episode of Women and Resistance, hosts @Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq., and Adesoji Iginla sit down with the embodied voice of Dr Ida Gray Nelson Rollins, the first African American woman to earn a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree in the United States, and the first Black dentist of any gender to practice in Chicago.

We explore the inspiring life of Dr Ida Gray, the first African American woman dentist, highlighting her journ...

Abducted as a teenager, held in conditions her own poetry calls slavery for a decade, and rescued by a cousin who crossed the Indian Ocean to find her. A century later, she was East Africa's most revered female Islamic scholar, and the reason Qur'an schools in her hometown of Barawa are still run by women today.

In this episode of Women and Resistance, hosts Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq., and Adesoji Iginla travel to the Benadir co...

This conversation delves into the life and legacy of Josephine Baker, exploring her journey from a challenging upbringing in St. Louis to becoming a cultural icon in France.

The discussion highlights her struggles with racism, her reinventions, and her impact on art and activism. Baker's story is a testament to resilience, identity, and the complexities of fame, as she navigated societal expectations and used her platform f...

This episode features the inspiring story of Mary Fields, also known as Stagecoach Mary, an African American woman born enslaved who became a legendary mail carrier in Montana. She defied racial and gender barriers, showcasing resilience, loyalty, and strength in the face of adversity.

Takeaways

*Mary Fields' early life and slavery in Tennessee
*Her journey to Montana and life on the frontier
*Her role as the fi...

She was a princess, a Cambridge-trained lawyer, the first Black woman on the pages of Harper's Bazaar, a foreign minister under one of Africa's most feared dictators — and she said NO when that dictator demanded she marry him. This week on Women and Resistance, we tell the full, extraordinary, and largely untold story of Princess Elizabeth Bagaaya Akiiki of Tooro.

Born in 1936 into the ancient Tooro Kingdom of what is ...

This is a story about Black motherhood as resistance. About the legal limits of so-called “freedom.” About the Freedmen’s Bureau — what it promised, what it delivered, and where it catastrophically failed. And it’s about the unbroken thread that runs from Monemia McKoy to Mamie Till-Mobley to Sybrina Fulton to every Black mother who has ever had to fight for the right to simply keep her child.

I...

Mbokomu, the Ancestor Goddess of the Ngombe

What if the first woman on Earth wasn’t a passive creation — but a divine disruptor? What if she were sent down not because she was weak, but because she was too powerful to be contained?

This week on Women and Resistance, hosts Aya Fubara Eneli Esq. and Adesoji Iginla dive deep into one of Central Africa’s most captivating and under-explored mythological f...