Shaban Sidratu Jah: “We want to put an end to structural racism”

By Alicia Oliver.

Shaban Sidratu Jah, born in Sierra Leone, came to Europe as a refugee. She is now the head and founder of the European Network of Women of African Descent (ENWAD).
Shaban’s life has not been easy. Being the eldest of six siblings meant that she had to help support the family alongside her mother’s efforts. From the age of five he was selling food on the street to support his family. “The street is a very hard experience, especially for a girl. Experience that I have recently, now, managed to overcome”.
His father opposed the fact that he went to school: “knowing too much scares husbands”, he told him. That’s why she didn’t set foot in school until she was almost 9 years old, thanks to a visit from an aunt who lived in the Netherlands, and who insisted that girls, too, had to go to school.

You lived terrible years, in a country at war, how do you manage to escape from all this?
Being able to go to school meant a lot to me. I was the oldest in my class and I was a bit shy, but I liked to study and always got very good grades. I have been very restless and eager to learn.
I always had to work to help the family, but I continued to study. So I took a typing course and started to get familiar with computers, when nobody in my country did. Thanks to this I was hired by a Japanese NGO that worked for UNHCR. And from there I went to work for the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone.

From street vending, at just five years old, to working for the UN. Why did you leave your country?
I liked the work I was doing, but my father was preparing an arranged marriage for me. I had no choice but to leave the country. Because of the war we had no embassies and I had to go to Senegal to apply for a visa for the Netherlands, where my aunt lived. Working for the UN Mission made it easier for me to get the visa for a month, as they thought I would come back. And obviously, it didn’t go that way.
I ran away from a forced marriage and I also had to leave Holland because of my father’s pressure on my aunt to return. And I ended up in Spain, without knowing anyone. This was in 2005.

And how was your arrival in our country?
I applied for refugee status and at first I was received in Sabadell. Everything was new to me, even the language. They advised me to start with Spanish, and so I did. In Sierra Leone I got my first degree, ADE and here, in time, I was able to do a postgraduate degree at ESADE. After regularizing my situation, I started working in a logistics company in Sabadell, very close to the housing estates where I had lived. I married a Catalan, I have a son and a daughter. I have been working for different multinationals, in important positions. And I have continued to help my family in Sierra Leone.

Explained like this, it seems easy
Believe it or not, there have been hard times, too. I have to say that in general I’ve always met nice people, but I’ve also felt quite a bit of racism: people who didn’t want to sit next to me, or who clutched their bag tightly because they were afraid that steal from him It is not easy to live these situations.

Returning to your working stage in multinationals, how do you close this chapter and end up creating an association?
In the last multinational I worked for, they wanted to move me to Malta, but I already had my life organized here and I resigned. So I took the opportunity to continue studying, I did Law and now I’m doing a Masters at the University of London.
For a long time I had been thinking about working in the social field and helping the empowerment of women and young people of African descent, and combating discrimination and male violence, issues that I know very well from my own experience.

And you founded the European Network of Women of African Descent?
Yes, that was in 2013. Although I had previously had meetings in France, Germany, Sweden… with Afro-descendant women and migrant women, knowing their experiences and listening to their problems. And here, too, meeting and contacting women in Sabadell, in Granollers… women with depression problems, some had to ask permission from their husbands to go buy bread.
And at the same time, I found my son, then about 6 years old, discovering that his skin color was different from his father’s and from the rest of his schoolmates. From there, I began to delve deeper and work on the issue of racism and discrimination at school; and how boys and girls from different cultures should feel proud of their origins.

What goals does the organization pursue?
We want to end structural racism and all forms of discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. And also, eliminate female genital mutilation, here and anywhere on the planet.
We are a network of women of African descent who work to combat racism and racial discrimination, and we are committed to intersectionality and gender equality. We defend the protection of the rights of families and young migrant people.
They are empowered through education. In addition, we work to promote social inclusion, support respect for diversity and create awareness about the different cultures of women of African descent; addressing the social and economic challenges these women face.
In Europe, there is widespread racial profiling and discrimination against women of African descent. Their basic human rights are violated daily, they are used as sex slaves, they are discriminated in their workplace because of the color of their skin, they have limited access to education, work, medical care and decent work . Many are at risk of social exclusion.

What is your day to day?
At ENWAD we work on four lines: the first, anti-racist political advocacy. The second, empowerment of women and young people belonging to minorities. The third line is to promote the principle of non-discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexual diversity… And the fourth is to carry out studies and research on minorities in the political and social sphere, and to promote a decolonial view in the education
Twelve organizations are currently part of the Network. We are concerned about the vulnerability of migrant families. For this reason, we also focus on training, educating and providing access to basic social services. We accompany newly arrived young migrants. And at the same time, we try to raise awareness and sensitize society about other cultures and customs.
We would also like to work in origin, but at the moment, we do not have the necessary support and resources. The truth is that we can sustain our work here, mainly because of the large number of volunteers we have, but we need more funds. We are doing work that no one else is doing, but we are very surprised at how much the issue of financing is costing us. We have a lot of difficulties and we think that if it wasn’t us and it was another NGO, they would probably have a lot more funding. Honestly, I think that if we were white, we would certainly have more resources.
As ENWAD, we are also part of a federation of entities based in Brussels, made up of 185 entities from all over Europe: it is the European Network Against Racism (ENAR in English). It is the only pan-European network against racism that combines the defense of racial equality and the facilitation of cooperation between anti-racist civil society actors. The organization, made up of grassroots activists, was created in 1998 with the mission of achieving legal changes at European level and making decisive progress towards racial equality in all member states of the European Union. The main work, then, is that of political advocacy. Much progress has been made since then, but we still have a long way to go.