Hope Chigudu moderates an online conversation among members. of the pioneer AFF Working Group Hope Chigudu (HC): This is a conversation among movement warriors, thinkers, and strategists. We gather to reflect on the Charter’s legacy twenty years after the inaugural African Feminist Forum in Accra. We speak not to revise, but to remember, to reckon,…
Category: Archive
Pan-African Feminism in the Age of Neo-Imperial Apo-Collapse
by Nancy Kachingwe Introduction Post-colonial African feminisms have largely neglected the histories of capitalism, neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism. The concept of African Feminism was popularised by the publication of the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists in 2006. The Charter explicitly frames African feminist struggles against gender oppression as intertwined with resistance to racism, slavery,…
The Challenge of Reimagining Our Culture: A Feminist Perspective
by Fatou Sow Abstract This paper argues that African culture must be re-envisioned through a feminist lens in order to address African women’s claims to equality, bodily autonomy, and social justice, as highlighted by the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists. It demonstrates how cultural values – frequently mobilised by post-independence states – have…
The Dynamics of Birthing a Continental Feminist Movement: From Zanzibar to Accra
by Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi Abstract This feature article offers personal, candid reflections on African feminisms, movement-building and the bumpy journey towards crafting the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Women. I recount the story of creating an African-initiated, decolonial collective feminist space from the perspective of one in the “eye” of the storm. I analyse how,…
Alive and Growing: Twenty Years of the African Feminist Forum
by Sylvia Tamale Editorial AFF: The Unshakable Baobab We often hear the provocative remark: “the feminist movement is dead!” If feminism were truly dead, we would not see a global, ultra-conservative movement rising specifically to undo five decades of feminist achievements. Incubated by the crises of neoliberalism and imperialism and evolving into a new “hyper-imperialism,”…
Feminist Africa 2026, Volume 7, Issue 1“Twenty Years of the African Feminist Forum”
by Sylvia Tamale We often hear the provocative remark: “the feminist movement is dead!” If feminism were truly dead, we would not see a global, ultra-conservative movement rising specifically to undo five decades of feminist achievements. Incubated by the crises of neoliberalism and imperialism and evolving into a new “hyper-imperialism,” the anti-gender movement has placed…
Protest Arts, Gender and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Mediain Hausa Society across Borders by Ousseina D. Alidou
The book makes
it clear that Hausaness transcends religion, because Hausa speakers across
borders follow three distinct religions: Islam, the majority religion; Christianity;
and traditional Hausa religions, called the Maguzawa. Scholars of religion
would view the Maguzawa as one of the variations of African Indigenous
religions (Nrenzah 2024). In this regard, Hausa represents a shared space of
all religions with the Hausa language and culture as the basis of Hausaness.
African Feminist Ethics Within and Beyond the Academy
My mother was Mercy; I have a feeling my father didn’t want to lose the name
Mercy, so he also called me Mercy. So, both his wife and his first daughter are
Mercy. I was Mercy Yamoah until my thirties, when I became Mercy Oduyoye,
and recently I have decided I am Mercy Yamoah Oduyoye. In the international
world and Nigeria, I’m known as Oduyoye. In Ghana, they can’t even
pronounce the name, so I may as well relieve everybody by saying, I am
Yamoah. So, if you’re looking for Mercy Amba Ewudziwa Yamoah, that’s me.
Theorising African Feminist Ethics: What, Why and How?
African ethics has focused on “deciding general principles on which terms like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘duty’, and so on are to be applied to anything and with deciding precisely what these terms mean in the African context, and then in comparison with other cultural frameworks”
Silent Mourning: Re-Interrogating Feminist Ethics of Care and Government’s Political Communication during COVID-19 in Nigeria
Death is an unavoidable component of human life, an ever-present reality that, paradoxically, is increasingly avoided. In circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic, when governments’ political communication regulated mourning processes, women were affected in particular ways because they are typically the carriers and choreographers of funeral rites; during the pandemic, they developed a form of “silent mourning.”