Kary Stewart looks at how feminists are championing women’s rights across the continent and beyond, and examines what is at the heart of gender inequality

Reports and presenters:

KS Kary Stewart

Interviewees and speakers:

AO Awino Okech

JH Jessica Horn

PE Patricia Isabella Essel

HA Hakima Abbas

FS Female speakers

AO The way you walk, how you dress, you know, what route you take to work, are things that you have to think about much more as a woman than most men think about. Taking a jog in the evening in Nairobi is something a guy would do very easily, I would not do it because my body is threatened, and that’s simply because of being a woman. We say, “Oh, as Africans this is what we do.” No. Cultures are created by people, cultures are created by systems and the same way we create them is the same way that we can undo them.



KS That is Awino Okech, a lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies at Soas at the University of London. I asked her what she thought the African feminists want.

AO Freedom. I think all women all over the world: freedom. Freedom to choose, freedom to have the right over their bodies, to make decisions, to participate effectively and equally in the society.

KS According to a 2016 report by the African Development Bank, only about 15% of African women are landowners. In many countries fewer than 10% of women have access to contraception and over a third of women will experience violence from a partner, and this is all despite numerous international agreements designed to eliminate these gender inequalities. I’m Kary Stewart, and for this episode of the Global development podcast I speak with African feminists about how they are fighting for their rights and about their unique struggles within their own countries and their shared struggle within the continent and beyond.

So, according to Awino, the collective causes that African feminists share across the continent can be pegged on to particular historical moments.

AO So, if you look at the colonial period across different African countries, there were different ways in which women were organising. They may not have been in organisations or women’s rights groups as we know them today but the resistances towards colonial policies around taxation, resistances towards colonial policies and land dispossession and land grabbing – if you will – the resistances by women in concert with male colleagues around fighting or contributing to decolonisation struggles can be seen across Algeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria.

The post-colonial period of the African continent was obviously driven by sustaining that, by sustaining a debate on equality, sustaining a debate on women’s roles to contributing to development in the sort of post-colonial society, and that came with its own range of tensions. In the 1960s and 70s, across a number of African countries, these were largely one-party states, yes? So you’re not necessarily talking about a groundswell of democratic processes or enlarged democratic space, and so feminism in that way, in terms of public performances of feminism, were very much state controlled, party controlled.

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KS And as they settled into the post-colonial era, African states began to adopt democracy into their constitutions. Women born in the late 70s and 80s therefore grew up in an age of change, it was somewhere between the old and the new order, an age of contradictions.

AO For instance, my mother used to do work around – she was a teacher, a trained teacher – and she used to do work around girls’ education, access to girls’ education. So because she was a teacher I went to what I would call fairly good schools, but I would accompany her on some of the work that she did, and my discovery over time [was] that girls did not have access to equal education in the same way that I did – and for me, that was the first primary contradiction that I encountered.

The schools in which those were, who were debating about simple things such as facilities, you know, rural schools, facilities for girls and boys to ensure that girls actually came to class and were not missing out on education processes because there were no good toilets, lack of seats, so basic, basic things like that.

JH I’m currently based in Accra, Ghana, but I was born to a Ugandan mother and an American father and I grew up in the context of global south universities, which were very much at that time involved in the struggles for decolonisation, liberation, and in the struggle against apartheid. And so my own sense of activism and feminism is very much rooted in that kind of a politics.

KS Jessica Horn is the director of programmes for the African Women’s Development Fund. Her upbringing led her to witness a multitude of injustices.

JH I was always around my parents’ friends who were involved in the struggle against apartheid in Southern Africa when we were living in Lesotho. When I was younger, we would return to Uganda and it was a moment just after the reign of Idi Amin, and so the country was still filled with soldiers and with roadblocks. I remember being terrified as a child every time we entered a roadblock and there were all of these armed men. And so I realise, too, looking at my work now that it involves quite a lot of engagement around women in armed conflict that, actually, the trigger was very early, the trigger was those experiences of apartheid, of dealing with apartheid border police and with these kind of security forces in Uganda that also became kind of a frame for my urge to also want to address the whole issue of insecurity and women in insecure environments.

FS My dear friends, I would like to welcome you all to this really historic event.

FS It is simply not possible to leave out one half of mankind in this respect.

KS In 1975, there was a breakthrough. The United Nations organised the first of four world conferences on women, that one took place in Mexico City. In 1980, it was held in Copenhagen, in 1985 in Nairobi and then in 1995 in Beijing.

FS So that they may remain poor, underprivileged and marginalised, but we cannot lose hope. Here in Beijing in the midst of all of you, we feel that the sun shines.

AO I remember the first Beijing conference, or the pre-conference was held in Nairobi and I know one of the greatest debates that emerged in Kenya at the time, even though I was very young, was around the fact that Kenya appointed the first cabinet minister just before the Beijing conference in an effort for the presidency to look like it was actually doing anything around women’s representation in office.

FS The Fourth World Conference on Women must elicit commitments to action, coupled with commitments of resources. This is the mission in Beijing. No further analysis but a deeper level of action.

KS These conferences provided an opportunity for networking as well, and from learning from individuals and organisations from other countries and other continents.

AO A lot of the women who participated in the Beijing conference, part of the grand narrative that came out of that were the Beijing women because there was much more political push towards greater equality beyond tokenism that had occurred in Kenya a great deal. So I think those international spaces definitely galvanise much more transnational synergies and collaboration.

FS I have been inspired especially by the women from the south, from the women from the developing countries, who, against overwhelming odds, have fought to change their lives.

KS The Beijing Declaration and the platform for action was adopted unanimously by 189 countries and it set world strategic objectives, and those objectives are still considered the key global policy document on gender equality. So what did Beijing mean for feminists in Africa specifically?

AO It was really during that period, especially in the African continent, that you saw a flourishing of alternative women’s organisations that were not really aligned to the government of the day or the state but were really challenging the status quo.

JH The UN conferences were attended by women’s rights activists from all over the world with very active participation from African women, in particular at the Nairobi conference.

FS It is significant that the end-of-the-decade conference should take place in this beautiful country of Africa, where many of the challenges and hopes for the future of developing countries are crystallised.

JH And they in turn inspired both transnational organising, so kind of new connections between women’s rights activists in Africa and in other regions of the world, but also the women that attended those conferences went on to then found or create new women’s rights organisations on the continent, so there was a whole upsurge in organising around that was inspired by the UN conferences.

KS It’s quite a strong term though isn’t it? White supremacy to me seems like a really strong term.

HA Well I would ask you back, why does it feel like a strong term? What’s difficult about the term?

KS Hakima Abbas is the co-executive director for the Association for Women’s Rights in Development. I spoke to her at the recent Awid conference in Bahia and she explained to me what she says are the systematic problems which lie at the core of gender inequality, and these are capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy.

KS It seems slightly alienating. You know, if you are white it seems alienating.

HA Yeah. So I understand that, I understand that white supremacy, the terminology might be kind of paralleled with the understanding of white nationalism that’s expressed in movements like the Ku Klux Klan and others.

The reason we use white supremacy rather than talk necessarily about racism or prejudice is because it’s important to understand white supremacy as a system, as a system that’s existed for at least 600 years, which has enabled the colonialism, the occupation and the devastation and genocide of black and indigenous peoples on multiple continents, including in Asia and Latin America and South America, but also in the African continent.

KS What about the daily lives of African women? How do these systematic problems affect them?

HA If white supremacy is the power structure and informs the power structure, then you have the power to dictate how I live, the job opportunities I might have, the ways I’m able to express myself and to express my spirituality and my thoughts and all of these things, the ways I’m able to educate my children. And that power comes from multiple systems, it comes from the system of white supremacy, it comes from the system of patriarchy, it comes from a system of capitalism.

KS And from these systematic problems there seems to be a common issue of women’s security. Patricia Isabella Esse is from Ghana and she works for Women in Law and Development in Africa.

PE There’s a lot of ignorance around the laws that are governing us as black women in Africa, and then people are unable to access justice because they are poor. Before I got the information that I have now, I used to be very ignorant, not knowing where to even seek redress when it happens to us. And also a lot of my friends have gone through female genital mutilation and other dehumanising cultural practices that don’t augur well for them.

KS And here’s Jessica again speaking about HIV and Aids.

JH So in a lot of the African regions HIV/Aids had a tremendous impact on women and girls, and it continues to have; what was interesting about HIV was that it spread along the faultlines of gender inequality and what it raised was the issue of the fact that most women and girls live in contexts where really they have no right to self-determination about what happens to their own bodies. So everything from consenting to sex to decision-making around childbirth to being able to access adequate health facilities. And so, in particular, women living with HIV/Aids have responded in the African region in tremendous ways to raise these as both not just a health concern but issues of women’s rights and as issues for the state but also communities to address. And it very much also kind of helped establish an understanding of why bodily rights and why a woman’s right to health and to safety and security and bodily autonomy are central African feminist struggles.

But these days I think it’s rare to find any social problem that doesn’t have an African feminist response, African feminists are mobilising around everything from sexual harassment on Twitter to women’s right to be active participants in peace negotiations. And I think it’s interesting to see again how vibrant and how diverse the types of agendas African feminists are working on are. You know, the African region is enormous and people live in different political realities, but I think there’s also an overarching sense of solidarity with each other, an overarching sense of common cause, and women are also paying attention to what other feminists are doing and to also lending solidarity when issues and need arises.

KS And that’s what the African Feminist Forum is about.

JH So the African Feminist Forum is a regional platform that was established by a group of African feminist activists who were concerned that there was no space within the region where feminists could gather outside of their organisations actually with their individual politics and be able to share common causes, but also craft political strategies that we could use for common solidarity and action. I was the youngest member of the founding African Feminist Forum working group, and we worked to launch the African Feminist Forum in 2006 at the first regional forum, which was held in Accra, Ghana. And it’s grown from just over 100 activists who attended in that space to one that we held in early 2016 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where there were just under 200 African feminists attending.

KS All the women who join sign up to the feminist charter and this provides a very important anchor point for shared values.

JH So, basically, when you join the African Feminist Forum you sign up to the charter. People went on from the regional forum to create national feminist forums in the countries that they were coming from and in all of those countries so far, reading through and agreeing on the principles of the charter has actually been foundational in creating and clearing some of the political grey areas and in creating a space for collective support and collective action.

FS Our identity as African feminists. As feminists who come from, work or live in Africa, we claim the right and the space to be feminist and African. We recognise that we do not have a homogenous identity as feminists, we acknowledge and celebrate our diversities and our shared commitment to a transformatory agenda for African societies and African women in particular.

JH In the Ugandan Feminist Forum, when it was founded, the very first forum, quite a number of participants were struggling with the principles around acknowledging that people have full rights to choice regarding their sexuality and reproduction, including issues around sexual orientation and abortion. And a lot of people were struggling with what they felt was a religious position in the religions that they held that actually didn’t support LGBT rights or support the right to abortion. And so there was a process of values clarification and people coming to an understanding about why those are feminist issues and why it’s an important feminist position to take.

That process of clarifying politics proved critical because a few years later Uganda then started to face an onslaught of Christian fundamentalist impact on national policy and so we saw the tabling of the anti-homosexuality bill, the tabling of a bill that was criminalising pornography, but also policing women’s dress codes and for the policing of sex work. And in both instances that level of clarity, political clarity that people in the Ugandan Feminist Forum had created, helped enable solidarity with LGBT rights activists and again with people in the sex worker rights movement. If it weren’t for Ugandan feminist solidarity, a lot of the activism that happened around those bills wouldn’t have had the same character that it had.

KS And so back to the Awid conference in Bahia, where black feminists were looking to do just that, connect with each other. Awid had just hosted the first-ever black feminists’ forum, and it was attended by 250 black feminists and they came from Africa and from Europe, Latin America, North America and also Australia. At the forum they discussed interconnections, but they also talked about how struggles are being approached in a localised way. Hakima Abbas again.

HA So from peasant movements in Senegal and west Africa who are fighting against GMOs being imposed on them and how they connect with black women who are fighting for their territories in places like Colombia and black women in Haiti who are using spirituality as a form of resistance. So all of those interconnections were really beautiful to see. It also struck me that we had a fabulous group of young black feminists from the age of 15 up who are really already thinking about and analysing the situation and really giving us hope for what it will look like in the future.

KS And that is the work that African women have been working to do to engage their own communities, the African Union, the United Nations, all to bring about systematic change. And the work continues.

JH So one of the problems with international treaties and conventions is that they are legally binding but that also state parties also have to agree to be party to them. And what happens is that sometimes through peer pressure, sometimes through wanting to fight other political agendas, governments actually put in reservations around certain clauses and sometimes even move to withdraw. And so it’s always a little bit of a delicate situation, governments still need to be willing to participate and unfortunately again sometimes some of the means of actually holding governments to account are not strong enough. And so it means that in a way states can opt out.

KS That may well be the case but African feminists including Jessica do feel that there has been progress.

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JH Just at a very basic level the fact that now there is a greater appreciation of the fact that women have a right to be free, women have a right to voice and to be heard, that debate is alive and active, there are detractors and there’s certainly a tremendous backlash, but there’s also tremendous organising and I think a greater appreciation that that is indeed true. And you certainly see it with young Africans, that there is a greater appreciation of the rights of women to be an active part of our societies. I think if you look at a governmental level when it comes to women’s participations, you have countries like Rwanda that actually have now the most number of women in elected office of any country in the world, and there’s also always a lot of work to be done.

We have waning interests in donor communities, we have a waning interest in governments, you know, what we find as women’s rights activists is that we always have to stay active, that we can’t rest on our laurels, that there’s always backlash and sometimes that backlash is very organised and it’s quite fierce and violent, but that also again governments can wane in their commitment and that actually they don’t always continue to support the agenda when nobody is looking.

KS Meanwhile, African feminists continue to work together and build solidarity. And speaking to Hakima, she agrees that at the core of African feminism, and feminism itself, is the right of the individual to be free.

HA So the ways in which our diversities, our differences, come together and how we have to understand oppression as something that we’re all fighting for all, so that I’m not just black in one moment, I’m also a woman, I’m also cisgender, I’m also able-bodied and all of these things, so understanding myself in those multiplicities and understanding others in theirs and that I fight in solidarity with those who have differences with me because if they’re not free, I’m not free, if I’m not free – they’re not free. And I think that recognition has always been at the core of black feminist struggle and so we don’t just fight on one terrain, we fight on multiple terrains, and I think that recognition has become also very useful for other struggles and for other places. The articulation of that in this moment has really brought a new gaze to what that means.

KS I’m Kary Stewart and that’s all for this episode of the Global development podcast. You can hear all our podcasts on theguardian.com/global-development or on iTunes, SoundCloud or any of your favourite podcasting apps. Thank you for listening, goodbye.