Deprovincializing the Feminine/Feminist Cameroonian Nationalism of the 1950s: The UDEFEC and Pluriversal Black Feminism

Abstract

This article seeks to enrich the production of knowledge about Black feminisms by documenting the mobilizations of the Cameroonian nationalist activists of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, or UDEFEC, in the middle of the 1950s. I will center the contributions of African women to movements for women’s equality. To this end, I consider the emancipatory speeches and practices elaborated by female activists coming from rural zones within the frame of the reorganization of the nationalist public space in order to understand how their participation in the fight for liberation reveals a Black feminist practice. This approach outlines the contours of a political project as the vector for a holistic, equitable emancipation, focused on the margins and founded on the dismantling of the coloniality of gender and female citizenship, on the one hand, and the establishment of a democratic society that values popular sovereignty, on the other.