‘On Black Sisters Street’ Showcases the Nuances of Sexual Trafficking

Written by Precious Uzoma-Nwosu

Edited by Veronica Vivi

Illustrated by Noella Abba

While growing up, there were rules set by my father that were never to be compromised on, and
among them was not spending holidays with another family aside from our own. I was greatly
disturbed by this boundary, as my friends often share tales of their visits to their relatives’ houses
after the school breaks. As I became wiser, I realized that my father felt his children would be
safe from sexual exploitation, including sexual trafficking, if we stayed within his watch.
Therefore, it was home, school (although boarding), church, and places that were supervised by
him or my mother – he did not want to leave any loopholes.

His fears were rightly placed as according to a scientific analysis by the World Health
Organization (WHO), approximately 35% of women globally, have experienced physical or
sexual violence. So, he was just a father striving to shield his children, especially his four
daughters from such violence, sexual trafficking included. However, while his apprehensions are
valid, the issue is more nuanced. Social conditioning (namely unemployment and poverty), and
failed governments, come into play in sexual trafficking, irrespective of whether attentive parents
or not.

Great help in shedding light on these nuances include Nigerian movies such as Itohan, Muna,
and Oloture, where the main characters were either survivors, victims, or secret investigators.
Additionally, books, especially by Black women who have in-depth knowledge of these topics,
also revealed the layers of the details of sexual assault, its psychological impact, and its
infringement on women’s rights. A notable example is On Black Sisters Street, a work by Chika
Unigwe, an Afro-Belgian writer who is a recipient of multiple awards for her writing, and who
holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden. The book narrates the chilling tale of four women
sex workers (Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce), thrown together by Dele (a pimp) and fate in an
apartment in the red-light district of Antwerp, from the shores of Africa (Nigeria), bringing with
them an invisible bag saddled with stories only unpacked when Sisi is murdered.

Europe, among other countries, has been identified as a hot spot for the sex industry. According
to the European Parliament, in 2017–2018, over 14,000 identified victims of trafficking were
reported by EU nations, with 72% being women and girls. Women and girls belonging to this
72% were also from other countries, as a BBC interview with a Nigerian victim of sex
trafficking depicts Copenhagen’s Vesterbro (red light district), where she was unsuspectedly
trafficked, as a hub for prostitution for traffickers serves as an example.

With Nigerian sex workers letting her into their lives and a grant from Het Vlaams Fonds Voor
de Letteren, Chika also reveals Belgium, the setting of On Black Sister Street, as a trafficking
territory in Europe, showing streets where Black women in sexy lingerie are displayed in a glass
box like accessories to attract customers. Using Belgium as backdrop, Chika explores in depth
the themes of sexual trafficking and slavery, revealing different angles to her readers.

Firstly, human traffickers and pimps do not often present themselves to the victims as they truly
are. Their camouflage can be likened to the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing: they offer
promises of a better life (opportunities victims could not access in their home countries), fake job
offers, deceptive romance, and education from sugar-coated lips that could make even cautious
parents fail to see right through them. According to Sofia Papadopulos (2020:2021), migration
and trafficking both find their root causes in the context of origin: it is commonly agreed upon
the principle that people migrate (whether legally or not) for seeking better conditions of living.

However, with Dele’s guileful mannerisms, it was obvious to the girls what was expected of
them: prostitution. He, nevertheless, sold this idea with the promise of a better life for those
wanting to improve their living conditions. Therefore, for unemployed Sisi, the arrangement
seemed fair: travel outside, work with her body, pay Dele with the money she acquired from it,
save some for herself, and live the life of luxury she has always wanted. Unfortunately, a
shocking truth awaited Sisi, as she realized that she would not be granted asylum and be
considered persona non grata in Europe. Under these circumstances, she could not work on her
terms – her body was no longer hers and she was open to sexual exploitation and harassment
from customers. Dele’s games were well-played. Further, through Ama’s story, we derive that
family neglect and mistreatment could also be a factor in sexual trafficking. Ama’s driving force
to go to a foreign land was to prove to her family – her father (Brother Cyril) who sexually
molested her for years, and her mother who chose marriage over her daughter – that she could
lead a successful life without them.

While it is easy from the comfort of our homes to scoff and ask victims, “Why then didn’t you
try to leave such a situation?”, On Black Sisters Street informs the reader that victims face
significant difficulties in case they desire to leave, as their passports and documents are often
confiscated from them upon arrival. They are, therefore, forced into sex slavery by the debt of
accommodation and travel, which is to be paid in installments, and normally take a couple of
years to complete. Moreover, those who took direct action to regain their freedom, such as Sisi,
place themselves at risk of getting their lives cut short by their pimps and organization, which
hardly leaves a feasible way out. Readers also discover that those who engage in this system of
exploitation are not just uneducated individuals unaware of its risks and repercussions, but also
literate ones like Madam. Despite knowing the harm and trauma sexual trafficking causes to
young women, they do not care and only focus on making profits and being in power.

Finally, through my supervisor, when I intended to utilize On Black Sisters Street for my thesis, I
discovered that the text has been studied by multiple academics in their research on the sexual
exploitation of women. I am delighted that On Black Sisters Street has been acknowledged
within the academic community as it deserves all the recognition it can get. While I encountered
this text for the first time during my college years, I strongly believe it should be included in
high school literature curricula to educate young minds. This education fosters self-assurance
and the ability to speak out against trafficking, thereby contributing to its prevention. Perhaps, if
Dele had revealed the harsh realities awaiting the young ladies once they arrived in Europe, they might have reconsidered their decision. In addition, such inclusion in curricula could spark an
interest in young individuals to advocate for policies and programs aimed at combating sexual
trafficking and providing support to survivors in college or as a career pursuit later in life.
Overall, it is imperative to educate both young girls and boys about sexual trafficking beyond the
surface-level knowledge they might acquire from the streets or friends. This education is vital for
their safety, well-being, and the broader battle against this appalling crime.

References and Works Cited

European Parliament (2021, February 11). ‘Stopping Human Trafficking: MEPS Call for More Action’. News of the European Parliament.

Deirdre, F. (2022, April). ‘Sex Work and the City: Liminal Lives in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street. Journal of Migration and Culture Studies, 13(1), 47-60.

Papadopoulos, S. (2021). ‘Human Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation Purposes: A gender-based approach to the Nigerian – Italian route’. Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict-Ruhr University Bochum.

Pressly, L. (2021, October, 23). ‘Trafficked to Europe for Sex: A Survivor’s Escape Story. BBC News.

Unigwe, C. (2009). On Black Sisters Street. Random House.

WHO (2013), “Global and regional estimates of violence against women: prevalence and health effects of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence: Executive summary”, WHO, op. cit.

Precious Uzoma-Nwosu is a culture, content and creative writer who specialises in topics relevant to women and covers other thought-provoking and intriguing stories that matter. Precious has written for reputable magazines like AMAKA Studio, Resonate, Voice Box, Culture Custodian, Adventures From, Document Women, Gay.Uk, etc. and is also a book reviewer. You can reach her on Twitter @adannaya.

Illustrator – Noella Abba, Instagram: @symphonianoella

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I May Destroy You, Atlanta and Get Out: Afro-Surrealism and the everyday horror of Blackness

Written by Laura Hackshaw

Edited by Veronica Vivi

Illustrated by Daley North

This is a show tune
But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail

Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer

– Mississippi Goddamn by Nina Simone

‘‘Afro-Surrealism is drifting into contemporary culture on a rowboat with no oars…to hunt down clues for the cure.’’

– D. Scot Miller – Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black is the New Black a 21^st Century Manifesto (2009)

*This essay contains spoiler alerts for several TV shows and films

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What’s the price of feeling seen? Dido Belle and historical representations of Blackness

Written by Kimberley Aparisio

Edited by Katya Zabelski

Illustrated by Holly Summerson

In the summer of 2021, I wandered into Kenwood House, a stately home situated in the middle of Hampstead Heath, North London. Therein, I encountered this image.

Princess Henrietta of Lorraine, attended by a page (1634) by Van Dyck

The portrait provoked thoughts about the infantilisation of black men and the reinforcement of spurious inferiority through images and media. I continued to make my way through the gallery, where I came upon the only other historical portrait of a black person.

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Her Nuclear Waters: An Appeal to Transcendence in Diaspora Art

Written by Mekhala Dave

Edited by Hannah McGurk and Ketaki Zodgekar

Illustrated by Jahnavi Zondervan

As a result of this globalised world, in the echo of the text from the Her Nuclear Waters comic by Chitra Ganesh, ‘tattoo her onto this city’s skin, stroke by stroke by stroke’, I moved into and away from borders. Borders, at once as the physicality of territories of nations, and as cultural, psychological and linguistic divides; as sites of violence and militarisation.

A picture containing text

Description automatically generated — Her Nuclear Waters, Chitra Ganesh (2013)

My story is an urban journey that takes place within the acceleration of globalization that opened passages of information and access to new intimacy with locations. The unfolding of the expansive Arabian moonrise over the sea, on an Alpine landscape and the mystifying rays of sun upon Scottish lochs. The poignancy of this untouchable safety in my childhood memories, nourished by the universal scenes of the Earth has persisted well into my adulthood. However, in my adulthood, I have developed a deep concern about the shape shifting of identities in our hyper-technological era, and this is something I have never explored within university curricula.

Chitra Ganesh’s artistic world of comics creates a dystopian comfort through the intermingling of feminine hybrid bodies and the divinity of cyborg-like elements with Lacanian texts. Informed by her own upbringing in the US, with South Asian roots, she inhabits a duality in her lived experiences, and depicts a transcendental churning of artistic expression in her comics. At first glance, her comics compliment the Afrofuturist tradition: a term introduced by the scholar Mark Dery and developed by Alondra Nelson in the 1990s, to describe the African cultures and jazz musicians that reimagine the power of African root and conjure futuristic tales of empowerment (Nelson, 2012). Understanding this decolonial practice as a recreation of an imagined future opens us up to new frames of interpreting Ganesh’s art. For example, in The Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway (1991) rejects dualities that limit a feminist world view, such as: Western/Eastern historie and animal-human-tech divides. Haraway posits that a cyborg identity could represent women of colour, and other ‘Othering’ (outsider) identities that subvert normative white women identities. As she articulates, the cyborg identity’ does not know the Garden of Eden, does not know mud and cannot return to the dust’ (p. 151).

Just as Haraway rejects Biblical thematic spin, instead embracing the cyborg identity, there is mysticism in Chitra Ganesh’s dystopian universe too: a fiery flame-like landscape with high fumes, a scene in which an accident has taken place, with the injured blended into the shards and pieces of materials in the calamity. In the loom of a gracious feminine creature with a space-like suit, from her, a gush of blue liquid spills onto the injured like an anecdote, submerging them. There is ambiguity as to whether the feminine creature only just met with the sight of the accident or if the anecdote gestures a part of her duties and this space-like suit certainly separates her from the injured, whose nakedness denotes a vulnerability. The feminine creature looks upon the injured with an observing yet sympathetic gaze, as she kneels by the injured, her figure is thrown into not only a caregiving role but also as a savior of the injured. The female form is often depicted in victimized, eroticized or even helpless roles, but this comic offers a welcome respite, instead acknowledging the female form in an active, skilled labour and even a heroic commanding role. Perhaps the feminine creature in the space-like suit is staring at the carcass of her old self that she left behind in order to embrace this new-found cyborg identity whilst she struggles to revive her new self and to entirely let go of her old self. The image is gripped with mysticism, but one thing is clear: there is no point of return.

Furthermore, in the text ‘…under her skin rise and fall: an immortal jellyfish, of unspoken pleas & mechanical hands’ (Ganesh, 2013) we see Donna Haraway’s commitment to viewing hybridity as a site of affinity, not of identities, but of kinship. The soul of a cyborg identity is here fueled by elements of being human, of nature, animal, and technology, without borders/divides. Unlike Donna Haraway’s embrace of a singular hybrid identity, the scholar Homi K. Bhabha (2004) carves out a third space for identity. The ‘third space’ recognizes the antagonism within the diaspora, between wanting a nostalgic return to the merits of the past, a ‘nation’s dust’, and the misalignment of settlement in a nation that is socioculturally opp. Not imposed and non-hierarchical, the ‘third space’ does a charming dance in recreating a ‘safe’ hybrid space for the diaspora.

In Chitra Ganesh’s comics inspired by the Amar Chitra Katha comics from India, which recount popular Hindu stories, her artistic tones draw subjectivities of the cyborg identity, as opined by Donna Haraway. Further her work bleeds into the third space, a conjuring of Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘third space’ by addressing this diasporic antagonism. Art exists in “high” forms, within a white cubic spaces, where Chitra Ganesh’s comics adorn gallery walls, but also in “low” forms: comics in the hands of children and adults alike or familiar memorabilia in personalised spaces. As globalisation accelerated through the 1990s, unwinding and flattening access to information with a postmodern force, South Asian diaspora art like Chitra Ganesh’s remains a spot-on testimony to my lived experiences across locations. The simplistic terminology “diaspora” means “dispersion from the land of origin” – it doesn’t just embody dualities, as propounded by Donna Haraway, but goes beyond them. We need to enact real diversity and inclusion to mend our fractured curriculum – in studies of identity and media, but also of borders and oppression and culture. However, a truly transformative educational reform in the way that we look at, immerse in and connect with art, requires the recognition that our intimacies lie in the study of ourselves in relation to the others, and that identity and Othering often overlap in ways that mirror our complex, collective, interwoven lived experiences of our world.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. (2004). The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne (1991). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.

Rambsy II, Howard (2012). “A Notebook on Afrofuturism”. Cultural Front.

Mekhala Dave is a doctoral researcher at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research is at the intersection of art and law. Her focus is on human rights representation from visual cues of art that is political and activist on issues of migration, ecology and gender.

Ketaki Zodgekar is a Research Assistant with the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict project and a Master of Public Policy candidate, an editor for Project Myopia, and Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.

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The Violence of a Thousand Paper Cuts: Recognising Bias in the Archives

A conversation between keondra bills freemyn and Rianna Walcott

Edited by Maia Walcott

Illustrated by Maia Walcott

In this conversation between keondra bills freemyn and Rianna Walcott they discuss the importance of recognising bias within both archival institutions and the archiving processes themselves. In this short interview we learn how keondra stumbled into archiving by collecting dear memories and holding them safe, which later evolved into a deeper love for recording other’s stories and ‘living archives’. They discuss problems with ideas of the ‘canon’, the need for structural change, and how we understand memory.

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A UTOPIAN CURRICULUM PART FOUR: VOGUING

PART FOUR: VOGUING

By Ibtisam Ahmed

Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo

Illustration by Iara Silva

As I continue to write this Utopian Curriculum series, it feels important to address questions raised from previous essays. In online conversations and email exchanges around parts two (Black Panther) and three (Sultana’s Dream), a particular point raised was whether something can be truly utopian if it is only positive and ideal for a specific demographic. It is apt, then, to dedicate part four to the art form of voguing.

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‘Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time’: Mark Sealy’s decolonial perspective on photography

By Maya Campbell

Artwork by Maya Campbell

Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar

In comparison to older visual languages such as painting, the relative newness of photography as a creative medium and the vast quantity of images it generates for consumption can be disorientating, especially when we want to evaluate the history of photography. As a tool, the image is highly flexible: historically, images have been digested by the public as a representation of social realities, despite their highly subjective and malleable nature. During my second year studying BA Photography at London College of Communication (UAL), we started to delve into theory surrounding contemporary photographic issues and practices. However, there was a noticeable vacuum in our lectures and recommended reading lists when it came to post-colonial critiques of images depicting the ‘Other’ throughout history. Though fascinating, all of the main thinkers whose theories our curriculum centred were greatly limited, their concepts produced through the prism of whiteness, masculinity and economic agency.

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The Visionary Films of Med Hondo

Illustration and article by François Giraud

Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar

Although he worked at the margins of the film industry for half a century, pioneer French-Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo (1936-2019) is not an obscure artist. As recently as 2020, the German publisher Archive Books compiled almost fifty years of interviews with Med Hondo, which shows the interest that his transnational and anticolonial cinema continues to elicit, decades after many of his films were released. In 1970, his first long feature film Soleil Ô—which powerfully denounces racism in French society and the exploitation and discrimination of African emigrants in Paris—received exposure at Cannes Festival and was awarded a Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Festival. Some of his later films, such as Sarraounia (1986) and Black Light (Lumière noire, 1994), have been studied in academic journals specialising in African and postcolonial studies.

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Queer Phenomenology: ‘While Standing in Line for Death’ by CA Conrad

Clara Hancock

Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar

Illustration by Яachel Lee

‘We are time machines of water and flesh patterned for destruction, if we do not release the trauma.’ (CAConrad, 2017)

CAConrad is a gender non-conforming poet and activist. I first came across their work in the 2018 Beatrice Gibson film I HOPE I’M LOUD WHEN I’M DEAD, which emphasises the necessity of poetry during the current American political crisis. Since discovering Conrad and their ‘(soma)tic’ bodily rituals, my own writing practice has been significantly altered, as I developed a deeper awareness of poetic embodiment. While Standing in Line for Death (Conrad, 2017) consists of 18 (soma)tic rituals, alongside poems that result from them. (Soma)tic poetics is a union of ‘soma’, a spiritual term derived from Sanskrit, meaning ‘to press and be newly born’ and ‘somatic’, the Greek term for the body. Conrad’s (soma)tic poetry investigates the space between body and spirit, and exposes the ways in which corporeality is integral to creativity, grief, expression and survival. The writing that emerges from these rituals repeatedly reminds us of the ways in which emotion is both bodily, cognitive, and a meeting point between the world and ourselves (Herd, 2017).

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Harmonia Rosales’ Black Female Universe

Words and Illustration by Tanatsei Gambura @tanagambura

Edited by Veronica Vivi

The Black imagination is a dangerous, radical phenomenon. More still is the Black, female imagination. It is an envoy into the speculative realm of pure freedom. In an existence that is marked by the suppression of the Black female form in all its shapes, the Black imagination functions as a powerful and liberating force. That being said, a pleasurable Afrocentric paradigm of the world is too abstract and incomprehensible to many. However, for Afro-Cuban artist Harmonia Rosales, not only is it conceivable, but, more importantly, it is a divine universe that can be translated into compelling visual representations for others to bear witness to.

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