By Amina Mama Keep expanding your horizon, decolonise your mind, and cross over borders. (Kochiyama, 1996) Introduction Fifteen years since the launch of the first issue on Intellectual Politics in 2002, this special editorial marks the end of the first stage in Feminist Africa’s life. The shared founding principle behind FA is the understanding that…
Category: Feminist Africa Issue 22: Feminists Organising – Strategy, Voice, Power
The 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 are the ends to which feminist organising is directed? What strategies are used to pursue which goals and what trajectories of change are envisaged? How do we effect change within ourselves, even as we strive to change relations and conditions at local, national, regional, and/or global levels? Whose voices are privileged, heard or silenced in the course of feminist organising and in what contexts?
Navigating Checkpoints: The Journey of the Liberia Feminist Forum
By Korto Williams In August 1990, I stood at a checkpoint somewhere in Liberia, not ready to die. I was 20. Checkpoints were sad, brutal, dehumanising. This was not the first checkpoint we had navigated, my siblings and I, carrying our paralysed mother in a wheelbarrow. We had walked from one of the neighbourhoods close…
Finding Spirit in the Work — Ukuthwasa
By Namanzi Choongo Mweene Chinyama To think collectively with other feminists about the power of healing and what it might mean for our movement-building and organising is both a privilege and a necessity. As we continue to ask ourselves, “How are women organising across the continent in subversive and radical ways? How are we learning…
(Writing) On the Wide Margin
By Varyanne Sika Feminist thought and imagination are permeating the work of some scholars but this influence, among the present generation of scholars, remains relatively rare. (Pereira, 2002: 27) The Wide Margin (TWM) is a digital journal of feminist thinking on matters thought to be important by its writers, who are of African descent. The…
Flipping Prisms: Feminist Creative Synergy Amps Up in Accra
By Sionne Rameah Neely Progressively over the last decade, feminist creative organising in Accra has taken shape through collectives and projects working to amplify visibility and provide affirming space for women and women’s stories in public spheres. This rise in visibility and inclusive spaces has taken place through a myriad of cultural events, occurring throughout…