Originally from Ivory Coast, her adolescence spent in Morocco and her professional life in Canada, Djamilla Toure knows what it is to be a black woman in the world. Witness and victim of discrimination, she made her experience a strength by founding the organization Sayaspora: a structure that promotes the voices of women from the African diaspora.
From our correspondent in Montreal,
The meeting is fixed in a very chic café in the business center of Montreal, Canada. Delayed by work on the road, Djamilla Toure sends four emails to apologize and clarify his progress. The young woman arrives, out of breath, and begins the exchange without even taking a coffee. She is only 25 years old, but she is already at the head of an ambitious structure, one of the initiatives of which is supported by the Canadian federal government: Sayaspora, a website that amplifies the voices of women from the African Diaspora based in Canada.
Discrimination as a black woman, Djamilla experienced it very early. Born in Abidjan, she left Côte d’Ivoire at the age of seven during the politico-military crisis, which began in 2002. Her family moved to Morocco. ” Before leaving, I thought I was going to the land of Scheherazade. It was stereotypical, and I fell from above. It’s as if I had been taken off the magic carpet of Aladdin by saying to me: “Come back down, reality is going to hit you and you’re going to find out what it’s like to be a young black woman in the world,” she recalled, dignified.
The insults she regularly receives for her skin color quickly remind her of where she comes from. Above all, she struggles to find her place. ” When I went on vacation to Côte d’Ivoire, they called me the Moroccan, when I was in Morocco, they called me the Ivorian and when I went to France, they called me the African “says Djamilla, bitter.
A naive idea
The young woman is not complaining either, aware that she is rather well off: ” My father-in-law worked in Morocco with the African Development Bank (…). We were called the golden youth of Casablanca, even though I often felt out of step with the others. » In Morocco, she takes up dance and theatre. This last activity allows him to overcome a stuttering that is no longer heard at all today.
After a baccalaureate in economics and social, she does not want to go to France like her classmates, because she knows that being black will be as difficult there as in Morocco. On the other hand, her best friend speaks to her of Canada as an El Dorado. Djamilla delays: “ There is systemic racism in Canada too, but it is much less frontal than in other countries “.
In 2014, the 17-year-old student arrived at the University of Quebec in Montreal, “ the school of the people, which pushes you to think differently », for a bachelor’s degree in international relations and international law. She discovers the African diasporas, which she did not meet as much in Morocco, and becomes the president of the association of African students. Djamilla then deconstructs an idea that she describes as naive: ” any black person does not necessarily have the same values as me, does not necessarily have the same desires as me. She thus developed her feminist commitment and discovered social realities other than her own.
In 2014, she broke down, on a sheet of her student room, “diaspora” into “dit/aspora” then transformed the word into “say/aspora” to recall Canadian bilingualism. Djamilla contacted five women with roots in the African continent based in Canada, to create the Sayaspora blog, an inspiring refuge for diaspora women from minorities. Articles, videos and podcasts trace the lives of immigrant women, discuss thepicture of womenAfrican. Dance evenings and exhibitions, too, until 2020, specifies the young woman, to integrate African cultures into the identity of Montreal.
Being African in the world of work
Djamilla discovers entering the professional world in 2018. Two years later, while talking with a friend, Fabiola, she realizes that she is not the only one to suffer discrimination when applying for jobs. ” I would have liked to know that we have the right to negotiate our salary when we arrive, even if it seems that giving us a job is already a favor. I wish I had been told I was going to face microaggressions, like remarks about my hair », Regrets the entrepreneur.
So she decides to add a mission to Sayaspora: “Build your ascent”, a project supported by the Canadian federal government. Launched in September 2022, 150 participants have already attended online workshops to learn how to fit into the professional world despite discrimination.
Determined entrepreneur
Today, Sayaspora is a full-time occupation for Djamilla. She hopes, with her team of volunteers, to consolidate her media. In what form, she doesn’t know: with images, no doubt, but without abandoning the items she loves either. This desire to evolve all the time, this resilience, the young entrepreneur owes it to the women in her family: “ My mother, my grandmother and my aunt were proud women, who knew that the world was hard, and who toughened me up and prepared me a lot. »
In line with these women who inspired her, she would like to act directly on the African continent. As a student, Djamilla worked on the status of women in West Africa: ” In some countries, women, who are the ones who work the most land, have less access to land ownership than men, for cultural, religious and economic reasons. “. A situation that deeply revolts her: she knows that one day she will work in a structure that fights against these inequalities.