From 24-28 July 2023, 30 women organisers from development-impacted communities in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe converged to participate in a regional Anglophone Feminist School hosted by WoMin African Alliance in partnership with the Southern and Eastern Africa Trade Information and Negotiations Institute–Uganda (SEATINI-Uganda). These women were farmworkers, market traders, artisanal miners, and members of communities impacted by palm oil, sugar cane and coffee plantations, as well as mining and green hydrogen developments.
WoMin has been running Feminist Schools since 2016. These participatory learning processes are aimed at bringing together activists embedded in local struggles with the aim of strengthening political consciousness, movement-building, and solidarity. While the first few schools were ‘Pan African’, involving participants from different regions across the continent, the approach to convening schools has become more focused over time and as relationships with partners have deepened. Now, the schools are either national, in response to requests from country partners or specific campaigns, or linguistic schools. These are multilingual spaces with English or French as the main language, with translation into local languages. While schools may be convened at specific moments and connected to national or regional campaigns, giving it a unique character, each school covers core political principles and ideas grounded in women’s lived experiences, struggles and strategies.
Over the course of the 2023 Anglophone School, participants shared stories of their communities and what they are fighting against, and collectively defined the kinds of development and alternative world they are fighting for. Through the implementation of creative popular education methodologies including body mapping, poster-making, and role-playing, the school became a space in which concepts such as patriarchy, feminism, capitalism, colonialism, and the ecological crisis could begin to be unpacked and understood in relation to lived experiences.
Case studies play a crucial role in WoMin’s Feminist Schools by offering participants the opportunity to explore how communities elsewhere are facing similar challenges, and how they are navigating their struggles and resisting, thereby facilitating valuable learning experiences. The 2023 Anglophone Feminist School programme centred around a case study of the Kaweri community in Uganda, which was forcibly displaced from their land to make way for a German-owned coffee plantation. Women from the Kaweri community were participants in the school and provided harrowing testimonies of their violent treatment by both the government and the company, who came in the night to beat them and burn their houses down. The community was told by the government that “the things of those without eyes are taken by those with eyes”, meaning that the community members failed to use their land ‘productively’ (i.e., to make a profit), and so it had to be given to investors. This bitter case study of coffee in Kaweri gave participants detailed insight into the nature and impacts of extractive developments on rural communities on the African continent and allowed them to draw clear parallels between their experiences across borders and different development projects.
One participant shared how the women of Kaweri have organised themselves in resistance: “We formed a women’s advocacy group through which we encourage each other and compose songs demanding compensation, equity, and empowerment. We have not given up and look forward to justice.” The stories of the Kaweri community’s resistance and resilience in their ongoing struggle for justice was a source of inspiration for the other participants who were encouraged to reflect on and share their own organising strategies and tactics.
The pulling together of the common threads which bind women’s struggles across the continent is critical to the process of strengthening organising and movement-building. As we deepen our understanding of how power operates in the world and how we are similarly and differently impacted, we are better able to build solidarity and take collective action. As bell hooks writes: “…finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” It is through this meaningful community that the seeds of powerful and sustainable collective action are planted. In the months following the Anglophone Feminist School, participants have remained in community with each other, sharing struggles and words of support, and laying the roots of lasting solidarity.
As we commemorate Earth Day, we must celebrate the women who stand at the forefront of the struggle to protect their communities and the environment from the ravages of harmful extractive industries. We must also continue to prioritise the creation of organising platforms in which meaningful community and solidarity can flourish.
