Minna Salami in conversation with Moha Gerehou

With her blog MsAfropolitan, Minna Salami has managed to build a space that is critical with the structures that shape Euro-centric societies. Using her experience as a European and as an African, she raises necessary questions: How can black feminism provide a critique of Euro-patriarchal thinking? In what way is joy inherently political for black women and how does it emerge? What liberating effects does literature have? How does a particular definition of beauty relate to power? In her book, “The Other Side of the Mountain” she talks about the purpose of her questions and her writing: “I realised that, if you want to change society, you have to change yourself. But in order to change myself, I couldn’t just attain new knowledge; I needed a new way of understanding knowledge”.

Minna Salami (Tampere, 1978) is a writer between two worlds: she was born in Finland, her father is Nigerian and she has lived in Nigeria, Sweden and London. She is the founder of the multi-award winning blog MsAfropolitan and, thanks to her collaborations with The Guardian, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and The Independent, she has been considered by Elle magazine as one of the twelve women who are changing the world. “The Other Side of the Mountain” (Temas de Hoy, 2020) has been published in the United States, the UK, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Finland.

Moha Gerehou (Huesca, 1992) is a journalist who also contributes to different platforms such as La Hora de la 1 on TVE, Vogue, or eldiario.es. A former president of SOS Racism in Spain, author of the book “What’s a Black Man Like You Doing in a Place Like This” (Península, 2021) and the audiovisual monologue “What Would My Life Be Like if I Was a Black Guy from a Movie”.