by Madeleine Wong Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic forced people across the world to grapple with insecurities and deep uncertainties while reworking and reconstituting social life in a globally linked “new normal.” This study investigates how the COVID19 pandemic disrupted the professional and personal lives of highly skilled Ghanaian migrant women and how they adapted to…
Category: Feature
A Black Sense of Place: A Cartographic Conversation with Katherine McKittrick
by Christine Vogt-William and Stefan Ouma IntroductionThis keynote conversation took place between Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University, Canada), economic geographer Stefan Ouma (University of Bayreuth, Germany) and literary and cultural studies scholar Christine Vogt-William (University of Bayreuth, Germany) at the 2023 annual conference of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University…
Work-life (Im)balance among Nigerian Immigrant Women in Canada
by Ọláyínká Damilola Ola-Lawson and Ọláyínká Àkànle AbstractThe increase in international migration since the 1980s has raised new and fundamental gender issues that merit further study and understanding. This is especially so within gender and feminist scholarship because as the numbers of international migrants grow, new gender and feminist realities and contestations will emerge. This…
The Effects of the Government’s COVID-19 Response on Migrant Women Living in Cape Town: Assessing the Coloniality of Citizenship
by Olivia Burton AbstractIn South Africa, the existing system continues to preserve unequal gendered citizenship rights based on colonial and apartheid hierarchies. Despite a rightsbased legal platform, the state reproduces racism, xenophobia, and patriarchy, creating a multitude of vulnerabilities for Black migrant women. The COVID19 pandemic and related restrictions have deepened global inequality, heightening the…
Theorising Gender, Class, and Mobility in Africa: Hegemony, Critiques, and Feminist Interventions
by Faisal Garba and Dorothy Takyiakwaa AbstractDominant migration scholarship has framed African mobility as an empirical anomaly to be explained through theories developed elsewhere, rather than as a starting point for theorising migration itself. This article argues that feminist development frameworks, including Women in Development, Women andDevelopment, and Gender and Development, reproduce the same error:…
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,…
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.”
Harnessing Yorùbá Care Concepts of Ìtọ́jú, Ìkẹ́, and Ìgẹ́as Ethics of Holism
To address the paucity of African feminist ethical theory, it asks: how do ìtọ́jú, ìkẹ́, and ìgẹ̀ pan out in various care contexts such as ikẹ́ọmọdé (child care), ikẹ́arúgbó (care for the aged), ìkẹ́ òbí (parental care), ìtọ́jú aláìsàn (care for the sick), ìtọ́jú agbèegbè (environmental care), ìgẹ̀ ọkọ (care for the husband), ìgẹ̀ àgbàlagbà (care for the elderly), and so forth? Ìtọ́jú encompasses simple care or nurture.
African Feminist Ethics of Co-creation: Researching Women’s Peacemaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo
During my interactions with the interviewees, they questioned me about my life as they assessed whether to share their hidden narratives, long invisibilised in academic and governmental archives.