Milumbe Haimbe obtient sa licence d’architecture à l’université de Copperbelt avant de partir réaliser un Master Beaux-arts à la National Academy of Art d’Oslo. Artiste pluridisciplinaire, elle s’inscrit dans une culture populaire, travaillant aussi bien le jeu vidéo que la bande dessinée dans une volonté affirmée de répondre au manque de diversité dans les médias traditionnels.

Dans son roman graphique The Revolutionist, Ananiya, l’héroïne, s’engage à combattre un conglomérat patriarcal, « The One Conscious Corporation »,  sur le point  de proposer à la vente la femme «parfaite». Noire, gay, de sexe féminin et jeune, la protagoniste offre un visage à des communauté peu représentées et s’attaque ainsi aux questions de genre, de représentation et de racisme. Face à l’archétype de beauté féminine, l’artiste oppose une héroïne, libre et affranchie, loin des standards de la bande dessinée dont les héros sont bien souvent des hommes, hétérosexuels et viriles jusqu’à la caricature.

The Revolutionist Part I

2013-2016

My graphic novel, The Revolutionist Part I, is a dystopia set in the near-future. It revolves around Ananiya, a moral cru- sader whose shenanigans with the underground resistance movement sets in motion a series of events that changes her world forever.

Synopsis

Ananiya’s world is set on a colony that is governed by the omnipotent One Consciousness Corporation. Social conform- ity in the interest of the collective is subliminally reinforced in every aspect of daily life. The Guardian are omnipresent, shadowy phantoms that appear at every turn. Faceless and nameless troops in masks, they are the enforcers of law and order on Arcanarc Colony. The corporation has eyes and

ears everywhere. But fearing that man, no matter how long or how hard he is restrained, “has a dark and inaccessible part to his nature that is filled with energy reaching from the instincts,” the Corporation creates sex robots — cold and

soulless machines upon which the colonists could exert their libidinous aggressions without risking their very humani-

The popularity of the sex robots is unprecedented and emerging from the midst of the frenzy is a new world order, one that is quickly rendering human women obsolete. From the subterranean city beneath super city Arcanarc arises the resistance. Dubbed the Army for the Restoration of Wom- anhood, its agenda is to restore womanhood by challenging the existence of the robots through passive, non-violent

advocacy. Ananiya was thirteen years old when she joined the resistance. Now at nineteen years old, she is a bonafide fanatic.

News spreads within the ranks of the resistance that the corporation is developing the prototype of Generation 8 of the sex robots. Code-named Project Freja, this prototype is rumoured to be so sophisticated that it is impossible to tell it apart from a real human at first glance. If this prototype goes into mass-production it is game over for all of wom- anhood. The time for passivity is over. The red alert passes down the chain of command to every single member of the resistance — destroy Project Freja by any means necessary.

In the ensuing standoff where the corporation increasingly maintains control with an ironclad fist, it is not long be- fore the resistance galvanises into a full-blown revolution.

Ananiya’s world is characterised by propaganda, censorship, curfews and police raids. She must contend with a cold war whose underbelly is dark and often perilous, but things reach a crisis point when her path crosses that of Project Freja. Her worlds collide when she begins to fall in love with the prototype robot. Will the revolution overcome *