Remarks by Aissatou Sene

Extract

I can feel what India was saying. I have a personal experience of it. I was in Sédhiou in 2016. I was with a group of friends, and we were at the festival. the festival was really white-centric, even though we were in Senegal. It was three in the morning. I was walking. I was in a short skirt. I was the only dark Black woman. I was picked up by the police, and when I answered to the police officer in Wolof, he told me the only reason I could be hanging there with white people is because I am a prostitute, and for that, I was taken into custody. When I was sharing that story with a lot of Black women and mostly with a lot of dark-skinned women in Senegal, it was not unique. Most of us were just target on the street because the police officer felt that we must be a prostitute, dressing a certain way.