Abstract
This article is a pan-African feminist intervention in popular education practices and discourses in Africa. We provide a broad overview of popular education’s genealogy in Africa. The first section examines conceptions of popular education, exploring conceptual contestations and practical challenges. We identify four periods in Africa’s popular education development, and these periods have distinct characteristics ranging from oppositional, to supportive, co-opted, and critical. This historical overview enables us to historicise the emergence of feminist popular education, which was in response to blind spots identified by popular education feminists and pan-African feminists. Drawing from these critiques, we advocate a pan-African feminist approach to popular education. To that end, we make several key interventions in feminist popular education literature. First, we argue that African women have long engaged in pan-African feminist popular education to address gender-specific oppressions. Secondly, we situate pan-African feminist and women’s contributions within the broader feminist popular education body of work. Lastly, we demonstrate how contemporary popular education practices draw from these historical foundations. Our key argument is that properly grasping practices and conceptualisations of feminist popular education in Africa requires examining historical archives and discourses through an expanded lens that acknowledges forms of popular education that are not explicitly labelled as feminist.We thus advocate for a pan-African feminist popular education approach that recognises often undocumented grassroots initiatives led by and involving African women.
Keywords: feminism, popular education, liberatory education, pan-Africanism, feminist archives
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01_FA2024_-Vol5.3_Feature-Article_Benya-and-Frehiwot