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.
Category: Archive
Towards a living archive of Pan-African Feminist Popular Education
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.
Pan-African Feminist Popular Education
Our intention is to contribute to the documentation of both historical and contemporary practices of pan-African feminist popular education. The issue is inspired by long-standing, often undocumented, practices of popular education in Pan-African and Feminist movements.The contributions in this issue actively engage African women on questions of power, patriarchy, pan-Africanism, class consciousness, and women’s rights and dignity in Africa.
Feminist Pan-Africanism and NEPU Women’s Education in Northern Nigeria, 1951-1979
The formation of NEPU in 1951 was a watershed moment in the history of feminist struggle for education for women in Northern Nigeria. Before this moment, women in the region were denied education as most married early (New Nigeria Newspaper 1968). Gambo Sawaba, the leader of NEPU Women’s Wing, advocated for the emancipation of women through education, going as far as appealing to the military government in 1968 to support a law that would compel parents to allow their girls to further their education at university level (New Nigerian Newspaper 1968).
Cultivating Seeds of Transformation: Reflections on Feminist Popular Education from Mozambique
Popular education approaches have been a means of building a fairer world. This article analyses how the experience of the Female Economic Empowerment in Mozambique known as MUVA, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) present in Mozambique since 2016, created practical opportunities for emancipatory and transformative learning.
Theory in Action: A Pan-Africanist Online African Feminist Reading Group
African Feminisms, including Pan-African Feminism, emphasise that there are multiple ways of knowing, and that profound knowledge can emerge from unlikely locations and groups. Popular and informal knowledge-making arises from collective and participatory learning platforms generated by the socially and politically marginalised, with the intention to recognise, value, inspire and challenge each other to grow, transform and find liberation.
Women’s Mobilization and Activism for Peace in Cameroon
This crisis was sparked off by a series of protests by Anglophone lawyers against the appointment of a majority of Francophone magistrates to Anglophone courts. Anglophone teachers later joined these protests to demand reforms, especially regarding the educational system. Though the government tried to address these concerns through a commission it set up, the protests continued and later turned into demands by some members of the Anglophone public, for a separate state.
Reconnecting Experiences to Politics: Purposeful in Conversation
It is imperative for those doing social justice work to go through their own personal journeys of liberation. Realising our feminist visions of what our communities and the world could and should be is not possible without these journeys – feminist popular education plays an essential role in sparking and nurturing this journey.
Pan-African Popular Education in Motion: A Conversation with Towards Feminist Consciousness Collective
Towards a Feminist Consciousness is a pan-African queer feminist col- lective founded in 2017 as a safe and liberating space to discuss, theorise, and organise around issues of feminism and liberation, deconstructing them in light of our contexts where systems of oppression intersect: colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, racism, and exile
Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa by Naminata Diabete. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.
“At the time when I was naked, I felt so powerful… the power even to hit a policeman…” (43). Naminata Diabate in Naked Agency interrogates expressions of resistance that women engage in across Western, Eastern, Southern, and Central Africa and beyond. This resistance, predicated on defiant disrobing, exposure, and shaming, she terms “naked agency”. Diabate…