The Power of Pan-African Feminism: A Conversation with Jessica Horn
Activist, writer, poet, and researcher, Jessica Horn. Photo Credit: Mikaela Westerholm. Photo courtesy of Jessica Horn.
By Jaimee A. Swift
Jessica Horn (she/her) is a powerhouse Pan-African feminist, activist, writer, and doer who is dedicated to creating safe and sustainable feminist freedoms and futures.
Jessica Horn is on a mission–and that mission is to catalyze a world where feminist freedoms are an ultimate reality. A Pan-African feminist activist, researcher, poet, and writer, Horn has dedicated over two decades of her life centering women’s autonomy and fighting for their right to live in a world without violence. Having lived on four different continents and traveled to over 56 countries, Horn’s political praxis is rooted in the power of collectivism and the pluriversity of African women’s productions across time, space, and place.
She is a founder member of the African Feminist Forum (AFF), a “regional gathering [that] brings together African feminist activists to discuss strategy, refine approaches, and develop stronger networks to advance women’s rights in Africa.” Horn was the coordinator of AMANITARE, the first pan-African regional feminist network on sexual and reproductive health and rights and she also co-curated UHAI EASHRI, “Africa’s first indigenous activist fund supporting sexual and gender minorities and sex worker human rights.” Aiding in the formation of FRIDA, the “only youth-led fund focused on supporting young feminist organizing”, Horn also was critical to the creation of AIR–the African Institute for Integrated Responses to Violence Against Women and Girls and HIV/AIDS.
As the Director of Programmes at the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), Africa’s largest Pan-African grantmaking women’s fund, Horn launched AWDF Futures Initiative, which interrogates how the organization and other African women’s initiatives are shaping the future of Africa. As the current Commissioner on The Lancet Commission on Gender and Global Health, Horn is also the co-founder and Commissioning Editor for Our Africa, a platform that interrogates African women’s perspectives on openDemocracy. A documentarian of African women’s history, Horn is also the co-curator, along with Laurence Sessou, of the temple of her skin, a visual project that profiles African women’s tattoo and scarification stories.
We spoke with Horn in June 2020 about what catalyzed her Pan-African feminist consciousness; the importance of documenting African women’s stories; why collective feminist care matters; and what an African Woman Radical means to her.
Jaimee Swift (JS): I am always interested in how people come into their feminist consciousness and praxis. Do you mind sharing a moment or moments that catalyzed your feminist praxis?
“It is because of this reality that for every Amílcar Cabral and Thomas Sankara, you also have a Freedom Nyamubaya. There have always been women who have really shaped ideology and who were also brave in shaping their praxis. It is really about patriarchal memory.”
Jessica Horn (JH): “It was really about my family consciousness in the context in which I was raised. When I was born, my parents were living in Lesotho, and at the time it was one of the core hubs of the anti-Apartheid movement. I grew up in a context where it was very Marxist-Socialist aligned and very alive to the anti-Apartheid politics at the time, which of course linked to broader African liberation politics. I grew up in an environment of debate and discussion. We actually later moved to the South Pacific where the politics were similarly decolonial and Third-Worldist. It is really from that broader political frame my feminism developed. I don’t like injustice and I never liked injustice even as a child. I also always had an affinity for women and girls. I think this [affinity] has much to do with my Mom, who at the time was also going through feminist consciousness raising herself through Marxist politics. Because of my upbringing and environment, I feel like I’ve always been a feminist. It wasn’t really one moment per say but it was really the way I was raised-and it just grew from there.”
“I also think about how important it is for people who have children and are around children for us to expand on our radical politics with our children because that is what framed us. If we want that legacy of radical politics to continue, it is really vital that we keep working on it with the next generation. It is important if we are going to build this movement. We have to start with the babies.”
JS: Oftentimes, African women are overlooked for their contributions to radical African movement building on the continent and in the Diaspora. In your experience, why do you think this is so?
Jessica Horn has dedicated over two decades of her life centering women’s autonomy and fighting for women’s right to live in a world free of violence. Photo Credit: Romaine Reid. Photo courtesy of Jessica Horn.
JH: “It is interesting because African women are at the heart of radical movement building, particularly African feminists who have been core allies in all the struggles that shaped the past couple of decades. African women were central to liberation movements but it is about who writes those histories and who is interested in those stories. Some African women were spectacularly erased because they were vocal and public. There is erasure because of neoliberalism and economic status because women are the most marginalized in these structures. African women are actually the majority food producers of the continent but it is in smallholder farming and it is not protected. The reason why African women are not centered is because of patriarchy and it is a preference for thinking or presuming that men are the shapers of history. When things are documented, they are not documented in the way that tells that story. I spent a lot of time in African feminist space trying to uncover those histories. I have been quite obsessed in regards to documentation and getting those names out there.”
“It is because of this reality that for every Amílcar Cabral and Thomas Sankara, you also have a Freedom Nyamubaya. There have always been women who have really shaped ideology and who were also brave in shaping their praxis. It is really about patriarchal memory. This lack of documentation of African women’s contributions is one of the reasons why their work is not as known in the Diaspora. Often, when we talk about African feminisms we look quite far back and so people evoke historical figures like Mbuya Nehanda and those kinds of women who were important to liberation struggles from long ago. There is rarely an invocation of African feminists who are currently doing this work and it is partly due to lack of documentation.”
JS: I love what you said here because I think about Black feminist documentation on a global scale and how our leadership is often not told broadly. However, while Black women and gender diverse people’s contributions to radical movement building are overlooked in the U.S., many people look to Black feminisms in the U.S. as a primary source and further neglect the experiences and productions of African and Afro-descendant feminists.
JH: “Definitely. I agree. It is definitely about the resources we have. We don’t have as many resources to meet and convene with one another. One of the ways we find out about people is when you meet them. There have been very few global convenings of Black feminist energy. At the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) in Brazil in 2016, that was the first Black feminist forum supported by AWID and there were sisters from all over the world who were Black-identified and Afro-descendant. Spaces like that where you hear from Afro-Colombians, Afro-Costa Ricans, women from North Africa, and different parts of the African continent–we have very few spaces like that.”
“There is also language. So much happens in English. I think we need to put more intention in language and support translation and engaging each other and reaching out across the language divide. I do understand that sometimes one’s local struggles are so big that it prevents one from being able to reach out beyond one’s local space. However, I also think it is inspiring to get a sense of how different people have done different things. Heritage-wise, we come from so many different places and we have migrated from so many different areas. It is important we learn from each other across the oceans of Black existence. We are linked.”
JS: May you please share more about your work on feminist care, particularly from an African feminist context?
JH: “One of the main antecedents to the current practice of feminist care was the movements of women living with HIV across Africa and how they came together to develop methodologies on positive-living. It was mainly working class sisters who didn’t have a lot of resources but were really trying to find ways to survive because of the stigma of HIV/AIDS. For a while, the death rates were really high and before the antiretroviral treatments and policies were put in place, people were dying really fast. People had to come together and be in community. They modeled ways of collective and self-care that were really accessible. There were basic techniques they used on and with each other. They made sure people had access to food. Some of the things we see now that are a part of the methodology of feminist care, African women were already doing. They also imagined care in ways that were accessible because a lot of well-being discourse is really elite and it requires access to services that most people don’t have or cannot afford. It is important to look at those models of collective care, which are really about community and tapping into resources that are available to us.”
“Some of the things we see now that are a part of the methodology of feminist care, African women were already doing. They also imagined care in ways that were accessible because a lot of well-being discourse is really elite and it requires access to services that most people don’t have or cannot afford. It is important to look at those models of collective care, which are really about community and tapping into resources that are available to us.”
“My work on feminist care grew out of a dire need among practitioners doing the work who were facing extreme violence, very serious conditions, and trying to work out models of care. A lot of the notions around what constitutes emotional well-being and mental health come from Western psychology. A lot of those notions are modeled on white men’s experiences. Particularly in the realm of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder as a concept really grew out of the experiences of male soldiers during the Vietnam War. That is not really an experience that is synchronous with most African women’s experiences of life. Some of the presumptuous underlying what does this mean and how to address it are not the same. There needs to be a re-thinking of the notion of trauma itself, what causes trauma, and what the therapeutic response should be. The initiative I was a part of creating–AIR–was a network of African practitioners working in all kinds of environments, but a lot of people were working in environments either in conflict or extreme economic deprivation. We came to the realization that what traumatizes us is not an individual experience of exposure to one violent act: it is living in environments that deny you your basic dignity. So the wound is not an individual action or act, the wound is the context of structural violence. If you are going to heal, it requires activist effort because you need to build tools for emotional resilience but we also need activism to remove those structural sources that affect the stress. It is a very different way of looking at the question.”
“We came to the realization that what traumatizes us is not an individual experience of exposure to one violent act: it is living in environments that deny you your basic dignity.”
“We were also against this very linear way of looking at emotional well-being responses. The constituencies people were working with for the most part don’t have access to trained councilors or medical personnel. And yet people are managing to work through intensely painful experiences and environments. What we know is that people use what they have. They use music, collective songs, dance, and ritual. They use tools that work on a deeper understanding of the self and the reality that we are not only individuals but we are a part of a collective. The pain of one person is often the pain of many people. When you look at what is recently happening in the United States with George Floyd, one man was killed but it hurts everybody. The pain is collective. In a way, healing also needs to be collective as well. A lot of these methodologies then look at this notion of collective healing process and contributing to each other’s healing but it must be done with therapeutic intent. That has really been the work. It is really about trying to understand, rethink, and decolonize our understandings of mental health and emotional well-being away from this hyper-medicalized and hyper-individualized strain and towards something more political that understands the structural and environmental quotas and seeks to take action on those while supporting individual and collective thriving. Also, it is about opening ourselves to expanding the idea of what constitutes therapy.”
“Another aspect that we looked at in AIR in particular is economic agency. For a lot of people, the process of displacement and war means that you have the inability to look after yourself or even have the means to feed your own family. To build one’s economic agency is one way to restore people’s ability to be resilient. It is not telling everyone to be an entrepreneur. However, it is true that people also want agency and that is actually a key therapeutic methodology--to give people the structural possibility to have agency over their own lives.”
Horn (right) speaking on a plenary at the African Feminist Forum in 2010 in Dakar, Senegal with Dr. Sylvia Tamale (far left) and Iheoma Obib (center)i. Photography by Nyani Qarmyne. Photo courtesy of Jessica Horn.
JS: Who are African women that inspire you?
JH: “I am increasingly inspired by doers. I am inspired by people who put their words into deeds. I am also inspired by collective action. What I have realized throughout the years is that saying is one thing and doing is a whole other thing! [Laughs] There have been so many contemporary mobilizations on the continent throughout the years. For example, the One in Nine Campaign in South Africa was a campaign that arose in response to [Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, also known as Khwezi] who accused Jacob Zuma, the South African president, of rape. She and others were really brave––they went up against the whole entire establishment. Those who participated in the campaign stood with her, even until her unfortunate passing.”
“I am increasingly inspired by doers. I am inspired by people who put their words into deeds. I am also inspired by collective action. What I have realized throughout the years is that saying is one thing and doing is a whole other thing.”
“There is a group of young feminists in Uganda who created a platform called Wulira and it is documenting African women’s history. They are really going out and doing their research! They are digging up archives and doing all sorts of fascinating things. Why it excites me is that it opens up the possibilities of what it means to be a Ugandan woman because across history, Ugandan women have been doing all sorts of things. It gives power to the notion that there is a lineage we belong to. I think one of the strongest things to have in your pocket when you face a world of inequality is that you have to have a sense of lineage. In terms of individuals, there are feminists like Hope Chigudu, a Ugandan feminist based in Zimbabwe, who does work around re-thinking self, organiziations, and how we organize ourselves together. I am inspired by Ugandan activist and lawyer Sylvia Tamale and Freedom Nyamubaya, who was a Zimbabwean freedom fighter who I met in the context of the Zimbabwe Feminist Forum. She was such an incredible, extremely creative, and generous artist and transgressive soul. She passed away, sadly. Yet again, she is a reminder of the role that women played in liberation struggles but also their continued commitment afterwards and to not just take up roles of power like a lot of the men did but to actually continue to support what the liberation was fighting for. She was a poet and she has a line where she wrote something to the effect of: ‘Liberation is a man but freedom is a woman’. She recognized liberation was only partial because it did not pay attention to the liberation of women.”
JS: What are ways U.S. Black feminists can build more solidarity with African feminists?
“A radical approach is a willingness to stay learning because you really have to be humble. You really have to commit to going to the root. You also have to stand up and be counted when it matters.”
JH: “I think we need to know each other first. It is very difficult to be in solidarity with people you don’t know. What are ways we can get to know each other–and by know each other I mean read each other’s work; engage in each other’s activism, and listen to each other’s music; and just really encourage that interconnection? We have online tools to be able to do that. However, it can be difficult because in the activist community, everyone has got different vibes! There are different energies and slightly different politics, so sometimes it can be hard to read somebody. The more opportunities we have to get to know one another, it really does help. We also need to circulate more information about each other’s struggles, about our thinking, and about our activism. Solidarity means to be there at the time when it is needed, so you actually need to know what is happening at that time.”
“There is a broader and more conceptual solidarity but practical solidarity means that when something happens in one place, people in other places respond. I have the networks I have because I have traveled and moved around a bit and have met women from other places. For example, when Marielle Franco was assassinated, I saw who ended up contacting who and the kind of network that was created to really think about what we can all do. We definitely need to know each other better. I think platforms like Black Women Radicals is one way because we all search and we are all curious to learn about one another. We are hungry to know [each other]. It is just all about finding out where. Ideally, if there are ways to physically and virtually meet one another to talk and to spend some time with one another, that is important. In any struggle, you have to spend time with people because that is how you understand who they are. We don’t just fight for people symbolically. We do it because we have a deep investment to keep each other alive.”
JS: What does an African Woman Radical mean to you?
JH: “It is a commitment to constant learning and to constant critique so you can understand the root of the injustices we face. A radical approach means addressing the structural underpinnings of the power imbalance–so it means really understanding the power dynamics that shape why an action or an experience happens or when you see certain groups of people get discriminated against more than others. A radical approach is a willingness to stay learning because you really have to be humble. You really have to commit to going to the root. You also have to stand up and be counted when it matters. It is scary to challenge systems of power–it is scary and it is dangerous. Systems of power want to stay in power and they will make sure that they do stay in power. There will always be backlash. So it also means to stand up when it matters and to stand alongside people who are being brave and say ‘I am with you’. It also means to critique and question your own discrimination, be alive to tremendous diversity, and to keep learning.”
For more information about Jessica Horn, please visit her website.