Congolese photographer Pamela Tulizo uses costume and vivid scenery to celebrate women’s strength and give a new perspective on slavery
About this content Tue 6 Oct 2026 08.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google P amela Tulizo’s latest series of photographs started with a question. “I asked myself, why are woman in my community in particular, and African woman in general, so strong?” says Tulizo, an artist and photographer from the Democratic Republic of the Congo . “Where does this strength come from?”
Growing up in Goma in eastern DRC, Tulizo was informed and inspired by the women she was surrounded by, including her mother, her sisters, her mother’s friends and her neighbours.
Years later, when she began to look into the role of women throughout African history, she says: “I realised that perhaps women have been forced to be strong since the dawn of time, forced by circumstance to build that resilience.”
View image in fullscreen Women are placed at the centre of the series of 23 staged photographs
Her research brought her to slavery, the “cruellest period in human history”, which is often just associated with the men who were forced across oceans to form workforces abroad. Women, she noticed, were largely invisible, their stories untold.
With that in mind, Tulizo placed women at the centre of her series of 23 staged photographs called Mababu (“ancestors” in Swahili). In it, she portrays figures such as Kimpa Vita and Queen Nzinga , who were both renowned for resisting the European colonisation of Africa in the 17th and early 18th century.
“Because of racism, there’s always been this belittling of African women that portrays them as vulnerable, as victims, and suggests they lack strength or intelligence,” says Tulizo.
“I wanted to end that narrative by showing that despite everything they endured, they remained strong and fought for freedom.”
View image in fullscreen Ubakaji – Swahili for rape. Cotton, another commodity that fuelled the transatlantic slave trade, features in Tulizo’s work along with tobacco and sugar cane
Tulizo’s path to photography has not been easy – in part, she believes, because she is a woman. She started her career as a reporter but decided to focus on photography when she felt she could not write about everything she wanted to cover.
There was nowhere to train as a photographer in Goma so she took photos whenever she could, and became one of a handful of female photographers in the city.
“It wasn’t easy at first because I didn’t have a role model to follow, or anyone to guide me in my early days,” she says. “The community didn’t accept me right away – whether it was my parents, or even other photographers – since it was very much a male-dominated world.
“But facing so many obstacles motivated me to stick it out to the end and prove that I could be a woman and a photographer,” she says.
View image in fullscreen Lulu . Women wrapped in bandages often feature in Tulizo’s work, referencing funeral rituals but also the idea of a hidden self
In 2020, her work Double Identity won the Dior photography and visual arts award for young talents, a series that contrasted the media portrayal of Congolese women as victims with their true identities. This allowed her to finance the creation in 2021 of a cultural centre in Goma for women and girls, Tulizo Elle Space . When renewed violence broke out in the region in early 2025, she fled and now lives in France.
She approached her latest series of work, Mab…