Nigeria 18

Sensuous Knowledge – Minna Salami

Minns Salami is the founder of Ms Afropolitan and a Finnish-Nigerian writer and commentator.

I was really interested to buy and read this book, partly due to the strapline “A black feminist approach for everyone” … I’m white, so there are experiences I will never understand because i will never live them, what I can do is read widely to increase my empathy. I was interested in this as I had just read Whitney Battle-Baptiste’s Black Feminist Archaeology for a reading group – the group’s perspective seemed to conclude that whilst it was super interesting there was little white archaeologist could “use”. This really frustrated me as fundamentally archaeology is about finding physical traces of empathy and to not find use in a theory that promotes the whole self as a way of examining the past in new ways just sucked. So does Salami’s book provide a “toolkit” to “use” black feminism in your life for white people? No i don’t think it does or should – what it does do is breakdown different aspects of black feminism and examine them through different lenses: a Europatriarchal one, a Yoruba/West African one and many others.

My main takeaways? I learnt a lot about Yoruba culture. I turned down so many corners of the book to mark ideas and thoughts I wanted to return to. I’ll definitely recommend this others.