Research is more than extraction” is an obvious principle, a mantra, for studies about people’s lives and most especially the lives of those who have suffered and still do from unimaginable yet all too frequent gender-based violence in times of wars and armed conflicts. Yet, historically, researchers from various disciplines have simply extracted “data” as impersonal bits and pieces, commodifying survivors’ experiences before leaving the research sites, never to be heard from or to return. Papers and books are published and nothing more is said or done.
Category: Archive
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. New York: Random House, 2021.
Most of these were Northern (Mbue lives in New York) and the book was heralded in the New York Times as one of the 10 best novels of 2021. Writing with some awe, reviewer El Akkad eulogised Mbue’s narrative of the resistances through which the fictional village of Kosawa seeks to survive being poisoned, attacked, and wearied into near-death, and then death, by the politics of oil extractivism under the control of Pexton, a United States-based company
Remembering Everjoice Jeketa Win (EJ)
This issue focuses on pan-African feminist popular education in Global Africa as a liberatory force for women. Our intention is to contribute to the documentation of both historical and contemporary practices of pan-African feminist popular education.
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.
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.