By Uhuru Phalafala The release of Koleka Putuma’s debut collection Collective Amnesia officially positions her within an ongoing global feminist dialogue with black female poets who utilise poetry as a vehicle to confront their particularised oppressions as women of colour. These young writers, be it Somalian Warsan Shire, Indian Rupi Kaur, Sudanese Safia Elhillo, or…
Category: Issues
Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke by Zubeida Jaffer. Cape Town: ZJ Books, 2016
By Gabeba Baderoon Questions of lineage mark much contemporary writing by Black women, from Nomboniso Gasa’s Women in South African History (2007) to Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia (2017), signaling a longing for beginnings and continuity in the face of the vast silences and abrupt severing which mar so much of South African history. In Beauty…
Tribute to Aminata Diaw Cissé: 1959-2017
By Fatou Sow Aminata Diaw was our friend. She was my colleague, my sister, my friend. We became colleagues upon her arrival in 1986 at the University of Dakar. Young and brilliant, with a string of qualifications under her belt, she became one of the first Senegalese women to teach philosophy there. It was still…
Elaine Rosa Salo (1962-2016) – An Appreciation
By Terri Barnes Everyone and anyone connected to Feminist Africa knew Elaine, so although I am typing this alone at my computer, I also feel that I am writing a collective statement about our friend and comrade. Elaine was not a friend to everyone. She did not suffer racists, fools or hypocrites lightly. Read the…
Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, by Karima Bennoune. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015
By Charmaine Pereira In a world marked by the proliferation of violent jihadi groups, what can be done to turn the tide against Muslim fundamentalism? This question lies at the heart of Karima Bennoune’s Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism. Bennoune’s award-winning book focuses on the struggles…
Rape: A South African Nightmare, by Pumla Dineo Gqola. Johannesburg: MF Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (PTY) Ltd, 2015
By Jane Bennett I make the assertion that rape is not a moment but a language…and I untangle and decipher the knots and codes of this language, to surface its structure, underline its histories, understand its rules. (Gqola, 2015: 22) In the two years since the publication of Pumla Gqola’s third book, Rape: A South…
Feminist Africa 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…
Raising the Veil — A Tribute to Bi Kidude (circa 1910-2013)
By Vicensia Shule We met Bi Kidude in 2003 in Zanzibar, when we were at the planning meeting for the African Feminist Congress. She liked to smoke and drink in public. She liked to sing in public. She also liked to straddle her drum and gyrate her hips as she beat that drum. She said…
Nudity, Protest and the Law in Uganda
By Sylvia Tamale The human body is itself a politically inscribed entity, its physiology and morphology shaped by histories and practices of containment and control. Susan Bordo (1993: 21) I view law(s) as an authorized discourse — as a language constituted by a series of symbols that is located in not merely the realm of the…
Reflections on Feminist Organising in Angola
By Aurea Mouzinho and Sizaltina Cutaia Context In the contemporary postcolonial history of Africa, Angola is known as the site of one of the most treacherous conflicts that has ravaged the continent. After independence from Portugal in 1975, the 27-year civil war among the three leading liberation movements — the Popular Movement for the Liberation…