Feminism has never done itself justice by circumscribing itself to pink ribbons and white-collared platitudes about “girl power.” No—true liberation isn’t about cosmetic victories or performative allyship. It’s a radical dismantling of systems, a defiance of borders, and a refusal to accept that patriarchy and capital’s claws can ever hold us in the same breath. Which is why the most dangerous feminism of our time doesn’t begin—or end—with #MeToo. It’s rooted in the soil of anti-imperialism.
The Congo, A War Nobody Saw
Imagine the Congo basin as it is: a land ripped open not by rebels but by Western demand. Where women in gold-mined villages are raped not just by soldiers but by the hunger of markets. Where children siphoned through child labor pick up your smartphone batteries while their mothers, their legs swollen with exhaustion, whisper prayers into the hollows of mining pits. This isn’t ancillary to feminism. It is the bedrock.
Anti-imperialist feminism doesn’t merely name these realities; it demands we ask: *Who owns the blood in the battery for your laptop?* The answer is the same as the one scrawled in red across the walls of a colonial archive: imperialism. The rape of the Congo, the rape of its women, was never just a civil conflict. It was predatory capitalism with a crown. And the same hand that extracts its resources also dictates how its liberation must look.
The first step toward an anti-imperialist feminism is to acknowledge that the struggle cannot be contained within a country’s borders—a fact that colonialism itself has spent centuries proving unlearnable.
From the Congo to Standing Rock: The Global Fracture of Patriarchy
Patriarchy doesn’t wear a uniform. It’s the quiet logic of pipelines cutting through land the same way it’s the warlords in Sudan’s goldfields. The violence is the same—a refusal to see Indigenous sovereignty as anything but “resource”—but the stories of resistance are told in two different languages, though they speak the same tongue: rebellion.
At Standing Rock, the Dakota people didn’t take to the banks of the Missouri only to lament their stolen river. They faced US Army vehicles backed by black helmets and drills, not because they wanted to be “heard,” but because the land itself was fighting back. When women in Standing Rock carried water during protests when police cut off supplies—a gesture as old as the matriarchal traditions of their ancestors—they weren’t just aiding a protest. They were performing an ancient act of defiance.
At the same time in the Congo, women in the villages of Kasaï braved military forces to protest their bodies being treated as both commodity and collateral. The violence was the same, but the refusal to accept either was a response born of generational defiance. One was a national fight; one was local. Both were fights for a planet that still belongs to people who remember who lived here in a time when “progress” hadn’t already left its footprint on their bones.
This is where the fiction of feminism’s localism collapses: no struggle in a corner of the world can exist independently of its violent entanglement with power. What happens when we demand reparations? When we start linking the theft of African land with the theft of Indigenous women’s decision-making rights? When we speak of the complicity of the international community in both?
The Illusion of Allyship
Feminism, at its most myopic, has insisted that “being an ally” means opening a dinner for survivors or wearing a badge with the flag of #TimesUp. But real feminism doesn’t start at a conference table. It starts at the places where the world’s poorest continue to be sacrificed on its altar. The same feminism that demands that rape victims be believed rarely interrogates which structures created the demand for their bodies to be weaponized for gain.
Consider the “culture of impunity” phrase tossed around by Western NGOs after the Rwandan genocide—if “impunity” were merely legal loopholes, how does that reconcile with the thousands of Belgian, American and global corporations profiting off ivory, coltan, and cobalt extracted through genocide? We can’t demand accountability for rape in Rwanda without naming the rape at the hands of global capital that continues in the same region to this day.
True anti-imperialist feminism will never tolerate lip service. It demands: Which women matter and to whom? And only when we confront that question are we ready to challenge the false neutrality of a movement that speaks with one voice while half the planet’s bodies have always been held above water with clenched fists.
The Radical Possibility of Connection
The 21st century has forced us to confront some uncomfortable truths: that feminism is everywhere, and that the fight for one body’s liberation is tied to the fight for the planet’s. When an Indigenous woman in Mexico refuses to kneel during a pipeline ceremony, she is not just standing against her government—she is challenging a global system that treats rivers like debt. When a South African woman leads workers against mining companies whose money funds wars against Africa’s liberation, she is fighting a war not only on her continent but against colonial violence everywhere.
What if we stopped insisting on separate victories and instead began to see the Congolese woman’s right to bodily autonomy as one thread in the tapestry that makes the Dakota woman’s protection of sacred land possible? The link isn’t sentimental; it’s material. The same forces that destroy water supplies to force women into servitude in the Global South will turn around and weaponize migration as a weapon to exploit bodies in the North. The connection is the only way to dismantle a system built on the systematic destruction of women and territories that don’t serve profit.
The Unwritten Manifesto of Revolutionary Resistance
Any manifesto worth its salt must ask: What do we want? The answer in an anti-imperialist feminism is not a single line, but a long list of reckonings. It’s the return of land to the Luba people, it’s reparations owed for every stolen mine, it’s a refusal to treat a woman’s fight as ancillary to the “big” politics of the state. It’s the creation of a feminist international not just on Twitter, but in the streets of Port Harcourt, in the campfires of Oglala land, in the kitchens where grandmothers still teach the next generation that defiance begins in the home and spreads across borders.
We need feminists who, when they speak, acknowledge that to dismantle one system, we must dismantle all systems. That to be free for ourselves means creating space for every woman—whether in Congo, Dakota territory, or the sprawling shanties of South Africa—to demand the moon from the hand that’s been squeezing it for centuries. We need feminists ready for the slow, brutal, but necessary transformation we call reparations. And we need women who understand how deeply interconnected a rape culture is when the market rewards violence while the state pretends indifference.
Feminism without anti-imperialism? Just another empire’s glossy brochure. Feminism rooted in its anti-imperialist truth, here and now? This is the beginning of every movement that changes everything.
