After a one-year hiatus due to the COVID-19, the Hadisi Urban Festival, the annual fiesta celebrating street art, returned to Goma, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, with female artists and women's empowerment under the spotlight ahead of the International Women's Day this year.
GOMA, DR Congo, March 8 (Xinhua) -- After a one-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hadisi Urban Festival, the annual fiesta celebrating street art, returned to Goma, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with female artists and women's empowerment under the spotlight ahead of the International Women's Day this year.
From March 4 to 6, dancers, musicians, graffiti artists across the central African country gathered in Goma, turning the city's sidewalks, backstreets and alleys into stages, in hopes of breaking down the fourth wall separating them from the audience.
Street artists perform on the sidewalks at the Hadisi Urban Festival, the annual fiesta celebrating street art, in Goma, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), March 4, 2022. (Photo by Zanem Nety Zaidi/Xinhua)
Under the theme of "Rev'elles" (a wordplay literally meaning "women's awakening"), organizers of this year's festival decided to go further by putting gender equality under the spotlight and thus breaking the glass ceiling for African women as a whole.
According to Amina Murhebwa, one of the festival's organizers, this year's event should be featured with young talented women, who tend to be under-appreciated across the country and the world, as a manifesto that women are equally capable as men in any discipline.
"We have decided for this third edition of this festival to place women at the center of the attention because we want to prove a point that women are as capable as men," she said. The Hadisi Urban Festival started in March 2019.
For Aline Karhonde, a Congolese dancer, the world is her stage, even if that means swinging her body to the music in front of passing motorists and passersby on a sidewalk, without acoustics or stage lighting.
Female street artists perform on the sidewalks at the Hadisi Urban Festival, the annual fiesta celebrating street art, in Goma, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), March 4, 2022. (Photo by Zanem Nety Zaidi/Xinhua)
"Through dance, we convey the message of living together. I think that dance is a very good vector to raise awareness of peace," Karhonde said, encouraging more female artists, who are always the "hidden gem" in the industry, to step out of their comfort zone and be their own protagonist on the stage.
"This dance that we performed with other women like me, was imbued at the same time with different cultures in the Congolese communities," Karhonde.
Speaking of the feminism campaign across the world, Murhebwa believes that the issue of gender equality should not also be talked about only in March, as the fight for equal status and treatment should go on a daily basis.
"We decided to put female artists under the spotlight because the struggle for women's rights must not only take place in March but also be done every single day," Murhebwa said. "Women are artists and a pillar in our society. Women can bring something for the development of our society." ■
