Feminist Africa Facing the Future and Townhall
Feminist Africa is back! The continent’s first open access digital journal of gender and women’s studies, was initiated at the African Gender Institute following a continent-wide consultation held in year 2000. Hosted at the University of Cape Town until 2017, FA relocated to the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies in 2017. IAS Director Dzodzi Tsikata joined the editorship which was further collectivised in 2020. Founding and former editor Amina Mama will re-launch FA at the Kwame Nkrumah Festival, with co-editors Charmaine Pereira and Sylvia Tamale. To complete the transition to the next generation of Feministt AFricans, the ensuing Town Hall will be an open discussion to generate ideas for future issues, and will be facilitated by incoming associate editors Sharon Omotoso and Penny Sanyu.
Market Queens: Transnational Traders
The Market Queens of Makola Market share their experiences as transnational traders who play important role in Ghana’s key commercial institutions with a view to understanding the complex subtleties of their activities, and how they organize women’s resistance to structural dysfunction and ineuqalities that women traders face, through the associations they lead.
Pan Africanism, Black, African and Feminist Radical Thought
This plenary panel sets the scene for the ensuing days of the Festival by addressing the latest theorizations of Black and African radical theoretical traditions, and how these are advanced by anti-imperialist and anti-racist feminism theory. This panel examines the radical implications of Black and African Feminism for the pursuit of AFrican liberation
Feminist African Theory, Culture and Practice
This session will feature leading feminist theorists and activists who refuse to separate their radical ideas from their actions and practices . It focuses on the emergence and re-emergence of women’s ideas and movements for freedom in the African region, seeking to bring a pan-African framing to movements that are in reality locally situated in particular communities and nations.
Feminist and Pan Africanist Literature
African and Caribbean Feminisms
What comes to mind when you hear the word Feminist? Discussing this and the pan African literary imagination are panellists Eintou Pearl Springer, Attillah Springer, Virginia Phiri, Lia Viera, and Donna Aza Weir-Soley on the Hannah Kudjoe Stage on the 23rd of September. This session is curated and moderated by the renowned Caribbean pan-African feminist literary theorist Carole Boyce Davies.
21st Century Feminist Social Movements and Struggles
The visibility of women on the frontlines of today’s struggles for decolonisation, democratisation, economic justice and emancipation draw attention to women’s leadership and the feminist agendas of Africa’s 21st Century struggles. Feminist scholars draw on their understanding of the long traditions of women’s activism and struggles, to consider the implications for theory and movement building. They address the question of 21st Century feminist struggles in Africa, their antecedents and what they augur for the future.
Lessons in Nurturing Feminist Leadership and Transformation on the Continent
Many people tend to misconstrue the concept of feminism, it implications for leadership, decolonization and the transformation of the continent. Veteran feminist organizers and leaders Hope Chigudu, Paula Fray and Member of Parliament of Uganda, representing Mbarara City 2021-2026, Rita Atukwasa, will discuss this subject on the 23rd of September.
Left Feminist Biographies
Following the screening of biograhical documentaries on Lorraine Hansberry and Ama Ata Aidoo, this panel brings together several of the worlds most accomplished feminist biographiers to discuss the lessons that we can draw from the lives and experiences of some of the worlds most revolutionary African women, Claudia Jones, Eslanda Robeson, and Suzanne Césaire, Jeanne Nardal, Aoua Kéita, Andrée Blouin the revolutionary couple, Walter and Albertina Sisulu. African feminist biographers and filmakers worldwide are redressing the systematic erasure of African women in the past and in the present (hint: watch out for the 2022 Issue of IJAHS on AFrican Feminist History at: https://www.bu.edu/africa/publications/ijahs/)
Pan Africanism, Feminism, Youth and the Arts: Post-COVID Transition and The Future We Want
