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: Editorial
Editorial: Rethinking African Feminisms in the “New” Normal
by Sylvia Tamale Introduction: Shedding the old Since the turn of the century, the world has changed radically, making it unrecog- nisable to activists who came of age in the 20th century.Yuval Harari’s provocative book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, lays out current global historical, political, technological, religious, and ecological crises plus numerous other…
Editorial: Africa’s 21st Century Feminist Struggles: Terrains, Formations and Politics
by Dzodzi Tsikata and Lyn Ossome Introduction This issue of FA reflects on Africa’s 21st century feminist struggles and move- ments, paying particular attention to the continuities and changes in terrains, organisational formations, politics, and strategies. The issue is inspired by the visibility of young feminist leadership in recent and ongoing struggles for decolonisation, democratisation,…
African Women Workers in a Changing World
By Akosua K. Darkwah This special issue on African women workers in a changing world discusses several themes that have long been the concern of feminist scholars with an interest in women’s work: transnational capitalism and its implications for women’s productive activities, the debilitating impact of land tenure arrangements in Africa on women’s productive and…
Gendered Tensions in Rural Livelihoods and Development Interventions
By Akua Opokua Britwum This issue of Feminist Africa revisits rural women and agricultural livelihoods, focusing on the persistence of contexts that compromise their ability to benefit from development interventions. An accumulation of studies over the years have set out to unravel the hindering factors. Some such studies, premised on the economic efficiency argument, push…
African Women’s Lives in the Time of a Pandemic
By Akosua K. Darkwah This issue of Feminist Africa reflects on both the impact of COVID-19 on African women and African women’s responses to the pandemic. As a continent, Africa has endured decades of economic, political and social crises. Since the colonial period, the continent has been a primary commodity producer, supplying the world with…
Gender and Sexuality in African Futurism
By Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué This Feminist Africa issue was inspired by my weekly conversations with five African-born graduate students in “Gender & Sexuality in Afro-Futurism”, an upper-level course offered by the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. We began the course by discussing why individuals of African…
Extractivism, Resistance, Alternatives
By Charmaine Pereira and Dzodzi Tsikata This issue of Feminist Africa marks the successful transition of the journal from its birthplace, the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, across the continent to the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Accra. After a three-year gap, Feminist Africa has…
The politics of fashion and beauty in Africa
From wigs and weaves to skin-bleaching to the clothes that we use to cover or reveal our bodies, fashion and beauty are complex structural considerations for women in Africa, and at the same time immensely personal. Occupying diverse socio-cultural positions, we exercise different degrees of practical choice over how we dress and adorn ourselves, limited…
Feminists Organising – Strategy, Voice, Power
By Charmaine PereiraThe focus of Feminist Africa 22 – “Feminists Organising” – implies a vision, a sense of alternative possibilities of greater social justice alongside the liberation of women from all sources of oppression, and collective feminist energies being mobilised to bring about change in this direction. How have feminists in Africa organised and what…