Honoring African Feminist Ancestors: The African Feminist Forum and Black Women Radicals Database Collaboration
African Feminist Ancestors
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African Feminist Ancestors 〰️
Image of a promotional graphic detailing the African Feminist Forum and Black Women Radicals “African Feminist Forum” collaboration.
Honoring African Feminist Ancestors is a collaboration between The African Feminist Forum and Black Women Radicals.
The African Feminist Forum (AFF) has partnered with Black Women Radicals by sharing their African Feminist Ancestors Project, which are profiles on historical African women leaders that are now apart of Black Women Radicals Database (BWRD). The BWRD historizes and visualizes Black women’s radical political activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora in efforts to build academic, political, and community engagement, dialogue, knowledge production, research, and education about Black women’s significant legacies as socio-political agents of radical change.
The profiles were originally posted on AFF under the African Feminist Ancestors Project. According to AFF, “the birth of the African Feminist Ancestors Project is based on the commitment to ground our activism, movement-building and strategies on lessons and inspirations of how African women in the past have negotiated power, challenged patriarchal notions of womanhood and also women’s roles within society.” The African Feminist Forum is a “regional gathering brings together African feminist activists to discuss strategy, refine approaches and develop stronger networks to advance women’s rights in Africa.” Pan-African feminist and founding member of AFF, Jessica Horn, facilitated the partnership between AFF and Black Women Radicals, upon reaching out to Jaimee Swift, the executive director of Black Women Radicals, to discuss the importance of centering and highlighting historical African women in the Black Women Radicals Database.
For more information about the African Feminist Forum, please visit here and here.
African Feminist Ancestors
African Feminist Ancestors
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African Feminist Ancestors 〰️
Bibi Titi Mohammed.
Bibi Titi Mohammed was a major leader in the Tanganyikan nationalist movement. She led Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania (UWT), the women’s wing of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), and later became the minister for women and social affairs. Mohamed’s earliest foray into the public sphere was through her involvement in maulidi, a performance celebrating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, and as the lead singer in an ngoma (a dance and music group). She attributed her later political successes to these involvements, because they gave her significant public exposure, practice in leadership roles and connections within important women’s networks. Her involvement in nationalist struggles started in 1950.
After World War II, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, nationalist movements gained momentum. In 1954, TANU was formed under the leadership of the former schoolteacher and future president, Julius Nyerere. Tanganyika was at the time a UN Trust Territory under British administration. Given her energy and drive, it was inevitable that Mohamed should become a powerful voice in the party. In 1955, she was asked to chair the UWT, and within three months of her appointment she successfully enrolled more than 5,000 women as TANU members. The women’s wing was set to play a big role in the independence struggles in Tanganyika and Zanzibar. Read more here.
Charlotte Manye Maxeke
Charlotte Manye Maxeke is known as the first Black woman from South Africa to hold a graduate degree, and for her exceptional contribution to the struggle for women’s and workers’ rights, and her lifelong dedication to the struggle for peace and justice. Maxeke was an individual whose every action was expressive of her extraordinary intellect, determination, courage, principles and love of God. Yet because of her gender, her name is sadly overlooked in the history of South Africa.
Charlotte Makgomo Manye was born in Ramokgopa in the Polokwane (then Pietersburg) District on April 7, 1874. As a young girl growing up in the Cape, Maxeke never allowed herself to become too discouraged by the severe traditional restrictions that bound girls to the home and village. With the help of her parents, she was able to reject such limitations, especially the barriers to formal education. She received a missionary education in the early 1880s. As leader of the Bantu Women’s League, Maxeke led a delegation of women to Prime Minister Louis Botha to discuss the issue of passes for women. She also helped organize the anti-pass movement in Bloemfontein in 1913. Read more here.
Constance Cummings-John.
Constance Cummings-John was a politician in both pre-and post-colonial Sierra Leone who campaigned for African women’s rights. She was born in 1918 in the British colony of Freetown, Sierra Leone, into the elite Krio Horton family. The Krios were the descendants of freed slaves (Jamaicans, Barbadians and Black Nova Scotians) who had been settled in the area by the British in the 18th century. Britain offered some support and encouraged the Krio to become anglophiles and see themselves as much superior to the peoples of the hinterland. Cummings-John’s family were intellectuals, entrepreneurs and professionals. She attended the best of the local missionary schools, belonged to elite clubs and societies and visited with members of the family living in other West African colonies.
In 1935, Cummings-John was sent to London to train as a teacher, a qualification she gained in a year, despite involvement in the major black organizations in London, the West African Students’ Union and the League of Coloured People (LCP). Sponsored by a colonial office loan, she went on to study vocational education in the United States in the 1930s. Like many other activist women of her time, her career trajectory started with the socially respectable career of teaching, but took a political turn as she became involved in nationalist struggles. Read more here.
Huda Sha’rawi
Huda Sha’rawi, an activist for women’s rights and social change, is a household name in the Arab world. In many ways, Sha’rawi represented the face of Egyptian feminism, as demonstrated by her actions, thoughts, speeches and writings. Sha’rawi was born in Minya in 1879 to Muhammad Sultan. She was taught to read the Quran and tutored in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Islamic subjects by Muslim women tutors in Cairo. She wrote poetry in both Arabic and French. Against her will, she was married to her cousin, Ali Sha’rawi. As a young woman, she showed early signs of her independent spirit by entering a department store in Alexandria to buy her clothes instead of having them brought to her house.
Sha’rawi’s early years of activism started with her establishing Mubarrat Muhammad Ali, a women’s social service organization in 1909, and organizing the Union of Educated Egyptian Women in 1914, the year in which she travelled to Europe for the first time. She worked across class lines to demonstrate against British occupation of Egypt and to lead the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee (WWCC). Sha’rawi often worked within the social confines of her time even as she sought to transform Egypt socially and politically. In 1919, she helped lead the first women’s street demonstration, the ‘March of Veiled Women’, in Cairo to protest British colonial rule and to foil ‘a British plan to exile four Egyptian nationalist leaders, including her husband. Read more here.
The Igbo Women’s War Of 1929
An important act of women’s resistance in Nigeria’s history is the Igbo Women’s War of 1929, which centered around market women’s opposition to unfair taxation and indirect rule in southern Nigeria by the British colonial authorities. Before the British colonized southern Nigeria in 1884, Yoruba and Igbo women in the region had powerful political, judicial, and religious roles within dual-sex systems of female and male authority. Power was shared between men and women in such a complementary manner to promote harmony and the well-being of the societies. In pre-colonial Igboland, social roles and responsibilities were the channels through which power diffused, and hierarchical relationships were determined by age, experience, ability, marital status and rites of initiation. Women exercised direct political power (though less than men) through all-female organizations, which included women’s courts, market authorities, secret societies and age-grade institutions. They wielded collective and individual power both as members and as heads of these organizations. However, the colonial period brought about the marginalization and even erosion of female political power and authority in the region. Read more here.
Kikuyu Women In The ‘Thuku’ Revolt
Kikuyu Women in the ‘Thuku’ Revolt: There has been considerable scholarly focus on the nature of women’s participation in nationalist struggles. The importance of this focus is to recognize women’s political agency and not relegate women to supporting roles in what tend to be understood as men’s political struggles. The colonial literature has presented two caricatures of African women’s involvement in nationalist struggles: women as ignorant peasants threatened into feeding resistance fighters; stripped of tribal affiliation, with nothing to lose. The reality, however, is more complicated.This excerpt highlights a particular moment of anti-colonial mobilisation among Kikuyu women in Kenya. It is important to point out that this mobilization did not suddenly happen; rather Kikuyu women’s had always exercised a degree of political agency in their communities. Along with men, Kikuyu women were adversely affected by colonial legislation depriving them of land, particularly as women performed most of the agricultural labour for the overpopulated reserves on which they lived, and were often used as seasonal workers on coffee plantations, too. Being forced to perform this communal labour and to pay taxes according to the laws of 1910 and 1934, greatly troubled women. Read more here.
The Kom Women’s Rebellion.
Kom Women’s Rebellion: Kom women in the Bamenda Grassfields of North West Cameroon launched a three-year period of revolt between 1958 and 1961 known as the Anlu Rebellion, which was provoked by the colonial imposition of vertical contour farming. Through public singing, verbal insults, dancing, demonstrating in public and seizing control of resources, women intensified their anti-colonial protest and troubled political power. The origins of the women’s rebellion lay in pre-colonial patterns of female organization and responsibility for public affairs. It centred on the restricted exploitation of resources through the British establishment of the Kom/Wum Forest Reserve in 1951. The resulting enforcement of cross-contour cultivation challenged and restricted the traditional methods favoured by rural women. Also, factors such as the introduction of Christian doctrine and other social changes orchestrated by the Western-educated elite exacerbated social segregation and attacks on tradition and customs, adding more fuel to the fire of the Kom women’s grievances. Recruitment of labour for commercial plantations was also socially destabilizing and gender-insensitive. Read more here.
Market Women of Lomé
Market Women of Lomé: In Lomé, Togo, Ewe market women undertook similar types of political action and resistance as their Nigerian and Ghanaian counterparts. However, the Ewe herstory is little known. Between 1932 and 1933, the market women were provoked into action by a vacuum of power created by a political stalemate between three male-dominated political groupings that were incapable of resolving the impasse created by new taxes. Following the defeat of Germany in 1918 at the end of World War I, Togo, then a German protectorate, was divided between France and Britain. The larger portion of the country, including the capital, Lomé, was placed under French colonial control. The three male political groupings were the French administration under the leadership of the Governor De Guise, the Conseil des Notables and the Duawo. The Conseil des Notables was the local council system created by the French administration. It consisted of 30 leading men and chiefs and aimed to legitimize the ‘democratic’ voice of the indigenous population. The Duawo was set up to act as an intermediary between the Conseil and the general population. The period was thus characterized by a struggle for urban political authority by these three groups. Read more here.
Queen Amina of Zaria.
Commonly known as the warrior queen, Queen Amina of Zaria was the first woman to become the Sarauniya (queen) in a male-dominated society. She expanded the territory of the Hausa people of north Africa to its largest borders in history. Much of what is known of Queen Amina is based on information related in the Kano Chronicles. Other details are pulled from the oral traditions of Nigeria. As a result, the memory of Queen Amina has assumed legendary proportions in her native Hausaland and beyond. The modern state of Nigeria has immortalized Amina by erecting a statue of her, spear in hand, on a horse, in the centre of Lagos.
The seven original states of Hausaland—Katsina, Daura, Kano, Zazzau, Gobir, Rano and Garun Gabas—cover an area of approximately 500 square miles and comprise the heart of Hausaland. In the 16th century, Queen Bakwa Turunku, Amina’s mother, built the capital of Zazzau at Zaria, named after her younger daughter. Eventually, the entire state of Zazzau was renamed Zaria, which is now a province in present-day Nigeria. Read more here.
Queen Nzinga.
Queen Nzinga of Angola is one of the most celebrated African women to resist European colonisation. Nzinga Mbande led four decades (1620s to 1660s) of warfare against the Portuguese in Angola. Her legacy is a controversial and paradoxical one, as she was a proto-nationalist resistance leader, a devout Christian and Portuguese ally, a superb but ruthless Mbande politician and a vicious slave trader. Despite these contradictions, what remains undisputed is Nzinga’s skill as a negotiator and military strategist: she was directly responsible for limiting the Portuguese colony at Luanda to a few square miles. Ana de Sousa Nzinga was born in 1581 in Kabasa, the capital of the Kingdom of Ndongo (now Angola), which was ruled by a people called ngolas. In 1571, a royal order from Lisbon declared that the kingdom of Ndongo be subjected and captured. The Portuguese had already converted the Kongo, a neighbouring people, and were after ‘black ivory’, that is slaves in Angola. Read more here.
South African Women Protest Pass Laws
South African Women Protest Pass Laws: In one of the largest demonstrations staged in South African history, twenty thousand women of all races marched to the Union Buildings on August 9, 1956 in protest against the compulsory carrying of passes by African (Black) women. This march was significant for its multi-racial mobilization and the direct challenge it presented to the apartheid government, indicating that women would neither be silenced nor intimidated by unjust laws.Apartheid was a system of racial segregation enforced by the government of South Africa between 1948 and 1994. Under apartheid, the rights and freedoms of non-white South Africans were curtailed through the enactment of laws and policies affecting movement, education, health care and access to public services, among others. Pass laws were designed to curtail the movement of Africans— men initially. The intended extension of these laws to African women meant that they were to become the direct targets of white power for the first time. Read more here.
Wangari Muta Maathai
Wangari Muta Maathai is known as the first central or eastern African to hold a Ph.D., the first woman head of a university department in Kenya, and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for ‘her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.’ Maathai was elected as a member of the Kenyan Parliament and served as assistant minister for environment and natural resources between January 2003 and November 2005. Maathai was born on April 1, 1940 in the village of Ihithe, Nyeri District, in the central highlands of the colony of Kenya. Maathai’s education included boarding school from as early as 11 years of age. Due to her outstanding academic performance, she was able to pursue higher education, a rarity for girls in rural areas of Kenya. In 1960, Maathai was one of about 300 students who participated in a programme that saw Kenyans benefitting from education in Western nations. Read more here.
Yaa Asantewaa.
Yaa Asantewaa of Ejisu is celebrated for her leadership role in resisting British colonization in the Gold Coast, now modern-day Ghana. She stood up to fight the British occupation in West Africa in spite of an initially cowardly response up by local men, which puts her in the league of Africa’s great women leaders. Yaa Asantewaa was born in 1840 as the sister of the ruler of Ejisu (Ejisuhene), an ethnic group in present day Ghana. Asantewaa was appointed queen mother by her brother, Nana Akwasi Afrane Okpase, whose reign was volatile. At the time, the Gold Coast was under British protectorate. The British supported their colonizing campaigns against the Asante with taxes levied upon the local population. In addition, they took over the state-owned gold mines, thus removing considerable income from the Asante government. Read more here.