Feminist Africa

Category: Conversations

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.

+

Cross-Continental Dialogues: Custodians of the Hearth – Abagusii Women as Knowers Who Produce, Transmit and Recycle Ancestral Knowledge

he theorisation of exploitative and dangerous systems such as patriarchy or colonialism has long been energised by the complex and evolving connections among gender, violence, and power. Research and activism that acknowledge such connections point to ways in which these systems often create normalised conditions of vulnerability, especially for people gendered within the “feminine.” Such theorisation has arisen most influentially in political work within civil societies that prioritises narratives of “abuse against women” as a starting point for redress, resistance, and revolution. The overwhelming focus on such abuses in African contexts has remained, however, on domestic violence and sexual assault. In the past decade, the focus has also increasingly include

+

“We Are Not Just Data Sources!” The Pursuit of Epistemic Justice

Through these conversations, we queer and decolonise dominant epistemologies while reflecting on the unique ways queer knowledge is created in the global South. We explore the emancipatory potential of storytelling, uncovering resilience, trauma, queer joy and the complexities of the mundane. This engagement becomes a vantage point for exploring epistemic violence, examining the intimacies of queering imagined separations between “communities” and “researchers” and interrogating how the unequal power dynamics between funders and recipient organisations influence knowledge creation.

+

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.

+