by Jaimee A. Swift
The Origins of the Collaboration
In June 2020, I received an email from Jessica Horn – a prominent Pan-African feminist activist, author, and founding member of the African Feminist Forum (AFF), who was then the Director of Programmes at the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF). She wanted to connect and collaborate with Black Women Radicals (BWR), a US-based Black feminist advocacy organisation with a mission to uplift and centre the power, perseverance, and possibilities of Black feminist activism in Africa and the African Diaspora. The collaboration sought to build an internationalist African/Black feminist coalition through honouring the radical leadership and lineages of African feminists profiled in the “African Feminist Ancestors” Project (AFAP). Created by AFF, the AFAP is an archival and political intervention that disrupts the erasure of “how African women in the past have negotiated power, challenged patriarchal notions of womanhood, and also women’s roles within society” (AFF 2016). In grounding contemporary African feminist activism by celebrating African feminists who paved the way for us, the project also “make[s] visible African feminist participation in African anti-colonial struggles, in projects of national liberation, and…address[es] the absence of literature on African women in advancing social justice” (AFF 2016). As a part of the collaboration, profiles from the AFAP were housed in the Black Women Radicals Database (BWRD), a free archive with more than 100 profiles on historical and global Black women leaders. As with AFAP, BWRD aims to build academic, political, and community engagement with Black women’s legacies as radical socio-political agents of change.
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