Section editor: Dr. Atsena Abogo, Marie Therese
Zorah on the Terrace
Henri Matisse, 1912
Fighting Freedom in High Heels: Listening to Black Women in Morocco
Dr. Marie-Thérèse Atséna Abogo, Associate Professor
ACSS Department, UCW
Introduction
The meaning behind the figure of “high heels” in the title of my work—Fighting Freedom in High Heels—is both literal and symbolic. It represents the right of African women to exist fully and visibly in professional spaces, without sacrificing identity. For decades, global discourse has positioned African as symbols of vulnerability. This narrative dominates development reports, humanitarian campaigns, and media representations. While grounded in real structural inequalities, it creates a partial and distorted understanding of women’s lived realities. It overlooks the everyday practices through which women sustain families, communities, and institutions in contexts of fragility. As Mohanty (1984) has argued, such narratives do not merely describe a pre-existing reality; they actively produce the “Third World woman” as a singular, ahistorical subject defined by her oppression, thereby foreclosing recognition of the heterogeneous forms of knowledge, agency, and resistance embedded in women’s daily lives. This paper challenges that dominant narrative by centering women not as passive recipients of aid, but as active producers of social systems. It asks: In what ways do women across Africa construct and sustain systems of governance, care, and meaning outside formally recognized institutions? And what methodological and epistemological shifts are required for scholarship to recognize these contributions?
This analysis draws on intersectionality, postcolonial feminism, and womanism. Intersectionality, as theorized by Crenshaw (1991), emphasizes the interconnected nature of social inequalities, particularly race, gender, and class, and insists that these axes of difference cannot be disaggregated without distorting the experiences of those who inhabit their intersections. Postcolonial feminism, associated with scholars such as Spivak (1988) and Mohanty (1984), critiques the imposition of Western frameworks onto non-Western contexts and attends to the power relations that structure knowledge production itself. Womanism, rooted in African philosophical traditions and elaborated by scholars such as Clenora Hudson-Weems, offers a community-centered model of empowerment that refuses the individualism of mainstream liberal feminism. Together, these frameworks provide a lens for understanding women’s agency beyond victim-centered narratives and for accounting for the relational, communal, and historically situated character of that agency. The analysis that follows draws on autoethnographic fieldwork in Mali, Senegal, and Morocco from 2020 to 2022, situating personal observation within a broader comparative framework. The paper examines Black Moroccan women’s roles as informal systems-builders. It furthermore examines race, memory, and legal inequality in Morocco as a case of reconceptualization of resistance.
North African Women as Systems Builders
Through travel and research in the African continent, I uncovered centuries of hidden history, including the legacy of the trans-Saharan slave trade and communities. My fieldwork in Mali (2020-22) demonstrated that women frequently function as informal institutions within and alongside state structures, performing functions of resource allocation, dispute mediation, and social reproduction that formal governance systems routinely failed to provide. But my journey eventually led me to Morocco, where a new question emerged: Who are the Black African women living in North Africa, why are their stories rarely told and how does women empowerment operate in their context?
The Raytsoutes[1], a community of sub-Saharan descent whose ancestors were brought north through the trans-Saharan slave trade, closely connected to the Gnawa spiritual and musical tradition —challenge a common misconception: that Africa is divided between “North” and “sub-Saharan. The Sahara has always been crossed. As El Hamel (2013) documents, the trans-Saharan trade routes sustained dense networks of cultural exchange, religious transmission, and forced migration for centuries, leaving communities throughout North Africa whose histories refuse the cartographic imaginary of a continent neatly divided at the desert’s edge. While my work spans global institutions and historical analysis, some of my most meaningful insights emerged from embodied, interpersonal encounters. The Moroccan case highlights the intersection of gender with race and historical memory. The presence of Black Moroccan communities reflects centuries of trans-Saharan movement. These communities, which include the Gnawa and other groups whose ancestors were displaced by the trans-Saharan slave trade, occupy a complex position within Moroccan society: simultaneously celebrated as bearers of musical and spiritual heritage and subject to ongoing racial discrimination and social marginalization. This challenges the perceived division between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Such a division, as de Sousa Santos (2014) would recognize, is itself a form of epistemicide—a cartographic violence that erases the connections, histories, and peoples who traverse its imaginary line.
I met Fatima Ouaziz, 27 years old, when we were studying at the University of Montreal, but she returned to her country couple a years ago. In Marrakech where I landed, the Ouaziz family (Fatima’s family) received me into their home in March 2021—cooking, celebrating, and extending to me the dignified intimacy of belonging. Fatima and her 3 Berberian sisters were notably medical doctor, engineer and business student. Fatima was the engineer : “I did not ask for comfortable shoes—I asked for the right to choose my own path” , as she explained. But she was also the sister keeper, the explorer and adventurer, the capacity builder in her small community. She was speaking on behalf of her mother, who appeared to be more timid and almost absent from public sphere, hidden in a culture where women roles were restricted to marriage and child custody. Fatima mostly acted as the emotional coordinator, the translator, and the system builder in her family and community. Her father was very proud of her. They were constituted, daily, in acts of community, care, and connection. They offered me a visceral reminder that women’s empowerment is not solely the province of policy frameworks or institutional programs. This observation resonates with Ostrom’s (1990) demonstration that collective governance often flourishes precisely where it is least legible to formal institutional analysis.
Across the sites I observed, women organized economic cooperatives, managed conflict mediation, and sustained educational systems. These activities represent forms of governance that operate outside formal state structures. In this sense, they constitute what Scott (1985) might recognize as infrapolitical practices: acts that are structurally consequential yet systematically overlooked by analyses trained on visible political spectacle. Ferguson’s (1994) concept of the “anti-politics machine” is also instructive here, as it reveals how development discourse depoliticizes precisely the domains—household management, community care, subsistence production—where women’s governance is most active. Rather than waiting for external intervention, women actively construct systems of survival and resilience.
Policy and Practice
While gender equality policies are important, their impact depends on implementation. As Enloe (2014) has consistently demonstrated, international policy frameworks are rarely gender-neutral in their effects; they reflect and reinscribe the gendered assumptions of the institutional actors who design them. In Senegal where I spent one year of fieldwork (2016-17) while working at the Ecowas Gender Center, grassroots networks serve as the essential intermediaries between formal policy commitments and lived transformation. Women’s associations, tontines, and mutual aid networks translate normative frameworks into practical support systems—providing credit, childcare, dispute resolution, and health referrals that state institutions consistently fail to deliver at the community level. This reveals a fundamental distinction between policy as formal recognition and practice as actual transformation. Without the latter, policy remains symbolic. In conflict zones such as in Northern Mali, women assume expanded responsibilities. They maintain caregiving systems, manage displacement, and ensure continuity. War intensifies gendered expectations rather than suspending them. This intensification is not incidental: it reflects the structural logic identified by Federici (2004), in which the social reproduction of labor power is offloaded onto women’s bodies and time, becoming especially acute in periods of crisis when state provisioning collapses entirely. Women become the invisible infrastructure of survival.
Women empowerment and conditions of vicarious trauma
The experience of Lebanese journalist Rima Maktabi illustrates the intersection of professional responsibility and emotional exposure of women journalists in the middle east reporting from war zones. They are require to witness trauma while maintaining composure. Feinstein (2006) has documented the cumulative psychological costs of this occupational demand, demonstrating that war correspondents exhibit significantly elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and burnout compared with civilian journalists. This creates conditions of vicarious trauma. For women journalists, these pressures are compounded by gendered expectations regarding authority and emotional resilience.
Women in the diaspora also experience conflict through transnational connections. Digital communication and family ties create a condition of emotional proximity despite physical distance. Appadurai’s (1996) concept of “mediascapes” and “ethnoscapes” is useful here: the deterritorialized flows of image, affect, and kinship that characterize transnational communities mean that conflict is not a geographically bounded event but a distributed experience that saturates diasporic life. This results in ongoing psychological strain that is rarely acknowledged in traditional analyses of conflict. Women in the diaspora often occupy the role of emotional coordinators within transnational family networks: receiving distress, sourcing resources, managing the expectations of relatives abroad, and translating between registers of experience that resist easy communication. The invisibility of this labor in conflict scholarship reflects a broader failure to recognize social reproduction as a political category deserving of systematic analysis.
Morocco: Race, Memory, and Gender dynamics
The trans-Saharan slave trade shaped social hierarchies that persist today. El Hamel (2013) traces the ways in which Moroccan legal and social frameworks historically encoded racial difference as a mark of servility, and how those encodings were never fully dismantled by the formal abolition of slavery. Fanon’s (1952/2008) analysis of the psychic dimensions of colonial racialization remains instructive here: the internalization of racial hierarchy is not dissolved by legal reform but must be actively worked through at the level of subjectivity, community, and cultural memory. Women play a central role in maintaining cultural memory and negotiating identity within these structures. This historical dimension is essential to understanding contemporary gender dynamics in Morocco. For Black Moroccan women in particular, the negotiation of identity involves navigating multiple and overlapping forms of marginalization—racial, gendered, and classed—while simultaneously functioning as the primary custodians of a cultural heritage that the broader society appropriates selectively and incompletely.
Legal Equality vs Social Reality
While legal frameworks may promote equality, social practices often reproduce inequality. Morocco’s 2004 Moudawwana reforms represented a significant legislative advance, strengthening women’s rights in marriage, divorce, and child custody. Yet, as Crenshaw (1991) argues in the context of anti-discrimination law more broadly, formal legal equality is a necessary but insufficient condition for substantive equality: it addresses the symptom of discriminatory practice while leaving undisturbed the structural conditions—economic dependence, social norms, uneven enforcement—that generate it. The experience of marginalized communities in Morocco illustrates this contradiction. Women, particularly those at the intersection of race and gender, navigate these complexities daily. Spivak’s (1988) provocation—whether the subaltern can speak, and under what conditions their speech is audible to institutional power—bears directly on this situation. Legal rights provide a platform; whether that platform translates into audibility depends on access to social and material resources that Black Moroccan women disproportionately lack.
Women maintain social cohesion through family networks and community relationships. These practices are foundational to social reproduction and stability. Federici’s (2004) analysis of social reproduction as the hidden foundation of capitalist accumulation illuminates why these practices remain invisible to mainstream political economy: they are simultaneously essential and unremunerated, productive and unacknowledged. They represent forms of resistance embedded in everyday life. In maintaining kinship obligations, transmitting cultural knowledge across generations, and sustaining the affective infrastructure of community life under conditions of structural exclusion, women perform what might be understood as a politics of persistence: a refusal of erasure enacted not through spectacle but through continuity.
Rethinking Resistance
Resistance is often defined through visible protest. However, in many contexts, it takes the form of adaptation, negotiation, and persistence. This challenges dominant frameworks that prioritize visibility over continuity. Scott’s (1985) concept of “weapons of the weak”—the everyday acts of foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, and subtle sabotage through which subordinate groups contest their domination without directly confronting it—offers a more capacious vocabulary for the forms of resistance documented in this study. What appears, from outside, as accommodation or passivity may represent, from within, a sophisticated calculation of risk and opportunity in conditions where overt resistance carries prohibitive costs. Conflict exacerbates inequalities in access to resources.
Women are expected to manage increased responsibilities under reduced conditions. The contraction of material resources during conflict—displacement, loss of income, disruption of supply chains, collapse of public services—falls disproportionately on women, who are simultaneously tasked with absorbing its effects and maintaining household and community function. This asymmetry is structural, not accidental. This dynamic is often mischaracterized as resilience rather than structural pressure. The discourse of resilience, as scholars have increasingly noted, risks naturalizing inequality by celebrating women’s capacity to endure conditions that should not be endured, thereby deflecting attention from the political and economic arrangements that produce those conditions. A more analytically honest account acknowledges that what looks like resilience is often the skilled management of structural injustice—an achievement that demands recognition, not merely admiration.
Conclusion
This paper demonstrates that Black women in Morocco are not waiting to be empowered. They are already building systems of survival and change. Through informal governance, community care, cultural transmission, professional witness-bearing, and the daily negotiation of legal exclusion, the women documented in this study enact a politics of presence that mainstream development discourse has systematically failed to see. This failure is not incidental: it reflects the epistemological priorities of frameworks that measure empowerment through institutional metrics, formal participation, and quantifiable outcomes, and that consequently cannot register the forms of agency that operate in the interstices of formal systems. Recognizing this requires a shift in perspective—from intervention to listening, from assumption to understanding. It requires, in the terms that de Sousa Santos (2014) offers, an epistemological humility that acknowledges the partiality of Northern knowledge frameworks and actively cultivates what he calls the “ecology of knowledges”—a pluralist stance that treats marginalized forms of knowing as legitimate interlocutors rather than objects of study. It requires, above all, the practice of listening: not as a preliminary to intervention, but as an end in itself, as the recognition that women’s voices carry authority that does not require external validation. Empowerment is not delivered; it is practiced daily. The task for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners is not to produce it, but to stop obstructing it—and to begin, at last, to listen.
[1] Raytsoutes (Black Moroccans) refers specifically to a tribe of sub-Saharan descent and slaves of the Sa'dī sultan from Bilād al-Sūdān — their story is traced back to 1592 when they served in al-Manṣūr al-Dhahabī's army. This confirms Raytsoutes as a historically grounded, community-specific term — not an outsider label. Amazigh (Berber) culture is a separate component of Morocco's multicultural landscape — one that holds a higher position in the racialized social hierarchy vis-à-vis black Moroccans. The Gnawa are described as stigmatized on the basis of their dark complexion — musicians historically known as former slaves whose musical rituals celebrate mystic figures from the Bilād al-Sūdān. Minority Rights Group International estimates Black Moroccans at approximately 3.7 million, representing 10 per cent of Morocco's population. With Morocco's 2024 population at approximately 36.8 million, that translates to roughly 3.5–3.7 million people nationally (source: Morocco - Minority Rights Group)
Belonging: Trauma, Cultural Erasure, and the Search for Identity
An interview with Dr. Andrea Nicki, Assistant Professor
ACSS Department, UCW
1.Andrea, thank you so much for your willingness to participate in this interview. To begin, would you like to share a bit about yourself—both personally and professionally—in whatever way feels most comfortable to you?
I am originally from Fredericton, a small city in the bilingual province of New Brunswick but was schooled on two separate occasions in England while my father, a university professor, was on sabbaticals. I hold a Ph.D. in philosophy from Queen’s University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, researching at the intersection of narrative medicine, feminist philosophy, philosophy of disability, and mental health ethics. I am a research affiliate of the Recovery Histories Project at Birkbeck, University of London, led by Dr. Ruth Beecher, and specialize in writing difficult subjects and trauma-informed narrative research. My work has appeared in Hypatia, the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and Lituanus. I have also published three books of prose poetry which draw on the complex social issues in my research. I am completing a book for a series in bioethics under contract with Bloomsbury Press as well as another poetry book. This research book includes some exploration of my poetry, presented as ethical testimony and counter-archive. The chapters have been presented at different conferences in the UK. My most recent writing explores the cultural erasure and marginalization of Lithuanian identity in Western contexts.
2.Lithuania has a history shaped by periods of occupation, loss, and collective trauma. From your perspective, how can these kinds of historical experiences continue to affect individuals or communities today, even across generations?
Because of the Iron Curtain and the geopolitical isolation of Eastern Europe, the Soviet genocide against Baltic nations has remained largely absent from North American public consciousness. This gap extends into feminist and diversity-focused academic discourse, where only certain narratives of migration and colonialism are included, while Eastern European experiences of Russian imperialism are misinterpreted or excluded. This contributes to epistemic injustice; while some forms of suffering are deemed legible and worthy of public resources and interventions in education, mental health care, and activism, others are not.
As I show in my work “Lithuanian Identity within a Canadian Context,” which is forthcoming in the journal Lituanus, Canadian culture still reflects a legacy of Anglo-Protestant dominance in academic, institutional, and social spheres, privileging Western European histories and identities. As a result, the Soviet genocide against Baltic nations remains largely excluded from Canadian education, and these countries are often depicted in distorted ways, as very similar to Western European countries, or as substates of Russia. This gap extends to the areas of psychiatry and mental health care, where practitioners, lacking training in cultural competence in Baltic culture, are unable to understand the experiences of Lithuanian North Americans and their descendants, impacted by Soviet state violence, such as deportations, gulags, forced emigrations, and ethnic erasure. My father suffered from serious mental health challenges and inter-cultural tension, which severely impacted family dynamics and well-being; he never received any culturally competent therapy and became very psychologically disabled after retirement.
3.Many people find that family can be a source of strength during difficult times, while for others it can be more complex. If you’re open to sharing, how has family support—or the absence of it—played a role in your journey or in the lives of those you’ve worked with?
Family support can be explicit or implicit and present locally in face-to-face interactions or online forms. As I argue in a chapter in my research book, in a highly individualized, expensive, and culturally segmented city like Vancouver, local family support can be a huge advantage to the extent that it may be characterized as a form of privilege. Such support can take the form of free emotional and practical help, which others need to access through paid services like mental health care and childcare.
Because of severe stress in my home environment, and lack of external help, I had a life-threatening illness at age 16. I left home at the age of 21 in a state of emotional and physical vulnerability for graduate school and was completely without a safety net. I had to quickly improve my life and social skills to survive, left to depend on kindness and help from professors and other adults. As they lacked knowledge of Baltic history, they were sometimes skeptical unsympathetic toward my explanations of my father’s heavy trauma load and serious family dynamics. Unlike the local students in my program, I did not have a home to return to during my years in graduate school, and so bonded with international students. Such early life adversity motivated me to be welcoming and inclusive toward people such as international colleagues and students.
4.Access to support—whether emotional, social, or institutional—can make a meaningful difference. Based on your experience, what kinds of resources or environments have been most helpful for people navigating trauma or recovery?
In the case of trauma related to family of origin and cultural differences, hermeneutical resources and knowledge about child welfare issues in Canada are most important as these can directly shape social climates and feelings of belonging. For example, according to the UNICEF Report Card for these issues, Canada, ranks only 19th out of 36 countries, despite being one of the world’s wealthiest nations, based on the indictors of physical health, mental well being, and skills development. Lithuania currently ranks higher, at 15th. Some of my cousins who grew up in Russian-occupied Lithuania had, in certain respects, similar family and social experiences, characterized by brutal Russian parenting styles (e.g. physical violence), suppression of Lithuanian heritage, culture, and language, and no social service interventions.
It is important for survivors to be in academic and social environments that do not assume everyone, including locals, has access to family support and to recognize that the topic of family or questions about family can feel stressful and exclusionary. I have been in some academic environments where people have referred in pitying ways to homeless people and foster care survivors, assuming that no one in the room could relate to this severe form of social under-support. In fact, I have met, for example, a few other professors at our school who disclosed experiences of severe adversity in young adulthood, such as an experience of homelessness.
5. Some impacts of trauma are not always visible or easy to speak about. If you’re comfortable, could you share any reflections on the more subtle or long-term effects you’ve observed, either personally or in others?
As care ethicists have argued, North American individualistic society is structured around the unpaid labour of the family unit and the assumption that families provide consistent care and protection. It is thus very difficult for people without family support privilege to share their real experiences and challenge this widely accepted belief. Consequently, they can find many social contexts chronically exclusionary and demoralizing, as others may misunderstand their unease and project false reasons.
6. When it comes to remembering difficult histories—such as those connected to Lithuania—what approaches do you think help create space for both acknowledgment and healing?
To promote acknowledgment and healing, I strongly believe in hermeneutical resources and equitable cultural inclusion in multicultural academic contexts. For example, public philosophers who explore the subject of multicultural citizen and minority rights in Canada explore the topic of Baltic nations to a very insignificant degree. Wil Kymlicka in Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (2007) only discusses the issue of Russians as ethnic minorities in Baltic countries, implying that the country itself is not under any ongoing, severe Russian threat, and not Baltic people as ethnic minorities in Canada.
Further, in moral philosophy classes in North America, when professors cover the theory of utilitarianism and concerns of promoting the greatest good, they typically discuss the famous Trolley Problem— a thought experiment about whether one should harm one person to save many. I have always been preoccupied with the subject of trains, ever since my father had said his father’s brother, a young new immigrant in America working in a mill, was killed one night by a passing train after getting drunk and losing his way. My father often referred to this train accident, along with patterns of alcohol overuse in his extended Lithuanian American family—a common problem in heavily burdened first-generation Lithuanian immigrants--to warn us against alcohol overuse. In philosophy classes when the Trolley Problem was explored, I had wondered silently about the duties toward strangers who are found dead on train tracks, how to ensure the prevention of such accidents, and how to justify and argue for greater resources put into public safety. Moreover, in (abstract) moral philosophy course designs, there are rarely questions centrally relevant to cultural groups, including Baltic North Americans and Siberian exile, such as “If your relatives are taken in a train to Siberia, what is your responsibility? What is your responsibility to your culture and country when living in the North American diaspora? What is your responsibility to future Lithuanian generations? Questions related to future generations in philosophy classes are typically only linked to the environmental ethics, about saving the planet. For example, in graduate school we never considered the philosophical literary text The Embrace by Lithuanian Canadian Irene Guilford, which explores her ethical duties to preserving her parents’ culture and contributing to her ancestral homeland.
7. Before we close, is there anything you would like to share—perhaps a reflection, a message of care, or something that has helped you find strength or meaning along the way
I would like to share a visual design called Beelonging. Beets are a central staple of Eastern European and Lithuanian cuisine, especially šaltibarščiai summer soup. This image recasts the Canadian flag with a beet at its center to promote greater visibility of Eastern European culture.
