The 2025 Sawaba Fellowship
This fellowship explores Alchemical Transmutations as a process of unmasking coloniality and examining its endurance across power, knowledge and ways of being. It invites fellows to deconstruct coloniality while repairing our relational commitments in thought, belief, behaviour and action.
Fellows are encouraged to explore, re-read and reimagine African conceptual frameworks across philosophy, feminisms, art, education and world-building. Through this process, they will question inherited ways of knowing, recover obscured possibilities and imagine new ways of relating to ourselves, one another and the worlds we seek to build.
The fellowship approaches decoloniality through four interconnected practices: exposition, framing, reframing and repair, creating space to uncover what has shaped us, interrogate it, reimagine what is possible and transform our relationships, ideas and practices.
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MEET THE 2025 FELLOWS
Meet Edwige Renée Dro (Côte d’Ivoire)
Edwige Renée Dro is an Ivorian writer, literary translator, and feminist working at the intersection of literature, linguistic justice, and gender. A Miles Morland Fellow and Iowa International Writing Program Fellow, she has served on prestigious literary prize juries and advisory boards. In 2020, she founded 1949, a library dedicated to women’s writings from Africa and the Black world.
Meet Sunshine Komusana (Uganda)
Sunshine Fionah Komusana is an African feminist lawyer, researcher, writer, and activist advancing tech and knowledge justice. As Decolonising Wikimedia Co-Lead at #WhoseKnowledge? She works to address gendered knowledge gaps while contributing to reproductive justice, feminist research, and movement building. She also co-curates African Feminism, a platform documenting diverse African feminist voices.
Meet Céline Apollon (Haiti)
Céline Apollon is a Haitian-American Pan-African feminist, researcher, and creative storyteller focused on gender justice and women’s economic security. Her work spans Sub-Saharan Africa, supporting survivors of gender-based violence through research, design, and storytelling. A John Lewis Fulbright Scholar, she leads CONSOLATION, a survivor-led initiative co-designing safe spaces for GBV survivors.