Brenda Odimba

Brenda Odimba (also spelled as Brända Audimba) is a Belgian engineer and decolonial activist. Odimba was one of the activists supporting the spokespeople of the 2021 hunger strike of undocumented migrants in Belgium. Odimba founded the association Mwasi asbl (NewSisterhood).

Early life
Odimba was born is Brussels in 1989. Her father is Belgian and her mother was born in Congo. Her mother lived in Belgium as an undocumented worker for a number of years. Odimba studied at Université libre de Bruxelles and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She is a trained Chemical Engineer.

Decolonial activist
Odimba is a decolonial activist. She helped organize the George Floyd protests in Belgium in 2020 and was part of an unofficial Black Lives Matter movement.

In April 2023, Odimba helped draw attention to a police shooting of a psychiatric patient in Brussels, at Fond’Roy Clinic. The clinic called the police on its patient after the patient became agitated. A collective of health professionals alleged that the skin colour of the patient was a deciding factor in the way the police handled the situation, resulting in the death of the patient, a Black man, while Odimba highlighted the fact that this incident of police violence was a result of the intersocietality of racism and validism.

Protest at the Béguinage Church
Odimba acted in support of the 2021 hunger strike of undocumented migrants in Belgium, which took place at the Béguinage Church in Brussels. Odimba called on the Belgian government to align its legislation on undocumented migrants with the rules of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. After the hunger strike had been brought to an end, Odimba denounced the rhetoric of Sammy Mahdi, the Belgian State Secretary for Asylum and Migration at the time, as manipulative. Odimba deplored that the strike had as an unintended consequence to divide the undocumented population between those who took part in the strike and those who didn’t.

Climate justice activist
Odimba is also an environmental activist. In 2021, she was one of the thousands of plaintiffs who took the Belgian public authorities to court over their failing to take action to meet the international climate targets. Odimba also wrote and protested against EACOP, a mega project in Africa by Total Énergies (oil industry).