Feminism(s) in Africa

The roots of International Women’s Day originate from the Socialist Party of America organizing a “National Women’s Day” in 1909 to honor a 1908 garment workers strike, and inspired by this, at the International Socialist Women’s Conference the following year, a group of German socialists (including Clara Zetkin, Luise Ziets, Paula Thiede and Käte Duncker) proposed an International Women’s Day. As Cinta Frencia and Daniel Gaido note for Jacobin, for these women, the adoption of the day “meant promoting not just female suffrage, but labor legislation for working women, social assistance for mothers and children, equal treatment of single mothers, provision of nurseries and kindergartens, distribution of free meals and free educational facilities in schools, and international solidarity.”But, as women continue to wage these struggles, it is important to look beyond the North American and European history, and to recognize the contributions of feminists from elsewhere since as Rama Salla Dieng emphasizes for Africa Is a Country series “Talking back: African feminisms in dialogue”: “There has been a deliberate erasure of generations of women from Africa, The Caribbean, India and Latin America because they contest mainstream feminism so their voices should also be heard, the specificities and nuances of their diverse struggles acknowledged.” So this week on AIAC Talk, we’re interviewing Professor Shireen Hassim, Rosebell Kagumire and Rama Salla Dieng. Shireen, a South African academic, is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics at Carleton University, Rosebell is a Ugandan writer, award-winning blogger and pan-African feminist, and Rama is a Senegalese writer, activist and lecturer in African and International Development at the Centre of African studies at the University of Edinburgh.