Luakam Anambe wanted her newborn granddaughter to have a doll — something she had never owned as a child working in slave-like conditions in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. However, she wanted the doll to share their indigenous features, and there was nothing like that in stores. So she sewed one herself from cloth and stuffing.
The doll had brown skin, long, dark hair, and the same face and body paint used by the Anambe. It delighted passers-by; while indigenous dolls can be found elsewhere in Latin America, they remain mostly absent in Brazil, home to nearly 900,000 people identifying as indigenous in the last census. A business idea was born, and her modest home now doubles as a workshop where she and her daughter produce dolls for a growing clientele.
“Before, only white dolls existed, then came the black ones, but indigenous ones didn’t appear,” said Anambe, 53, wearing a beaded necklace and a headdress of delicate orange feathers. “When indigenous women see the dolls, they sometimes cry.”
Photo: AP
Since 2013, Anambe has sold more than 5,000 dolls at local fairs and through social media, mailing them across the country, and she is fundraising to attend a German fair with the aim of exporting to Europe.
Her burgeoning business in Rio de Janeiro is a world removed from the Amazonian state of Para, where her life of hardship began.
She was one of 15 children and Anambe’s parents sent her and two sisters to live and work at a plantation. Just seven years old, she was charged with looking after the plantation owner’s toddler.
She remembers being rebuked after asking the owner’s wife for a doll; she should work, not play, Anambe recalls being told. And she received no compassion when telling the woman that she had been sexually abused. She never received any pay and complaints often ended with young Anambe locked in a dark tobacco storeroom, alone.
Anambe said she was 15 when the plantation owner forced her to marry his friend, a man two decades her senior, with whom she had a daughter. Anambe soon fled her violent husband, leaving her baby with family.
“We’re fighters, in a fight to survive,” she said, referring to indigenous people who regularly face peril from Amazon land grabbers, loggers, ranchers and miners.
Before colonization, “there were millions of indigenous people in Brazil. Today, there are far fewer, and every passing day, less and less,” she said.
Anambe worked for years as a cleaning lady in Belem, Para state’s capital. However, she felt life had more in store for her and that she should seek opportunities in one of Brazil’s biggest cities. She hitched an eight-day ride to Rio with a long-haul trucker and thought of him as a godsend, especially because he did not abuse her.
Her Indigenous features stood out in Rio, and she experienced prejudice. Eventually, she landed a job in a bikini factory and was able to send for her daughter, by then in her 20s. Little by little, they saved enough money to move from their one-room shack to a small home, where she started making clothes for some fashionable Rio brands. With the skills she developed sitting behind her sewing machine, she made her first doll.
“It’s like a mirror,” said her daughter, Atyna Pora, who now works with her mother. “Through the doll, we see ourselves, and we have to break down the taboo behind it, because we have always been very discriminated against.”
Anambe and Pora have expanded their portfolio to include dolls bearing face and body paints of five other indigenous groups. Each is handsewn, dressed in traditional clothes and carefully painted with a sharpened branch from a tree in their backyard, following indigenous custom.
“When I left the state of Para, I didn’t leave just for myself. I went for other women, too,” Anambe said. “Anaty came to give this empowerment to us, indigenous women.”
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS