WoMin started an 18-month popular education programme called Women Learning Liberation (WLL), in July 2024, bringing together grassroots women activists across six African countries, including Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Guinea Conakry, Madagascar, South Africa and Uganda. WLL was aimed at raising political consciousness of women where they examine their material conditions, understand systems of oppression, and strengthen their collective resistance, especially in communities facing capitalist pressures on land, forest, air, water etc.
In Uganda, WLL took on a particularly rich and transformative dimension. The Ugandan WLL cohort of 10 women collectively spoke eight different languages, representing five distinct struggles, from communal land protection to resistance against agro-industrial plantations. With over 40 languages spoken across a population of nearly 50 million people in Uganda, language became a central piece for our political education efforts.
We sat down with the WLL facilitator in Uganda, Sostine Namanya, to reflect on what it really means to facilitate, learn, and organise across languages.
What lesson stayed with you the most from facilitating WLL in Uganda?
So, I think for me, the impact has been I mentioned earlier about drawing from what the women are already knowing and experiencing and building that into education and learning.
The other lesson mainly has been about interpretation and language aspect, because Uganda is one of the countries that had the most languages, and I think that was both a challenge, but also a lesson. I think language can work, but language needs to be budgeted for, language needs to be prepped for, and you also cannot rely on professional interpreters. Either they are so expensive, or they are not professionals in a particular language which belongs to a certain minority group of people. The facilitator might need to be given more time to use the languages that are available in the room. So, if you’re translating three languages, Luganda, Runyoro, and English, I needed more time to go through those languages.
The other key lesson was realising that for me some of the concepts were deepened. Sometimes you know capitalism, you know power, you know eco-feminism, patriarchy, but from my understanding. Through WLL, I got to deepen my understanding of these key concepts, how they manifest on a day-to-day life, or on a local level. So, I think for me it was really fascinating to get to know that.
Uganda is incredibly diverse linguistically. How did you adapt your facilitation methods so that women could understand and participate fully in discussions during WLL?
So, to be honest, I think the question of language is good one. I speak three of the languages that were in the room, actually four, including Kinyarwanda, and then also English. In the room, we had people that speak those languages and do not comprehend English. So, I tried my level best to always speak English, then speak Luganda, then speak Runyoro, and then speak Kinyarwanda, as one of the ways that I had to work through the conversations.
Amidst some long sessions, I could have cut some of the interpretation that I needed to do because of time constraints, and I really feel bad for that, but at least I tried my best to speak those four languages that I’m very conversant with.
Consistently, I had to liaise with the woman that was supporting the Benet interpretation. One practical way that supported us is that her booth always needed to face us so that if something was not clear, people could show by face that they needed repetition or could not hear properly. This was also suggested by the women, that the booth should allow mutual visibility so that language and body expression clearly showed whether understanding was happening or not.
Consistently, I encouraged the women, especially the ones that speak Luganda, to ask me to pause and remind me when interpretation was missed. When I was speaking in English, they would say I had forgotten them and ask me to go back and explain. At some point, I would ask the national partner to also chip in, especially during smaller group work sessions. Another thing that made things easier was that group work was always based on one language, allowing participants to communicate more comfortably among themselves.
It was not easy, and at some point, there were tensions with the interpretation company and the national partner handling logistics, but it still worked. The interpreters were amazing, they delivered, gave us a discount, and have been consistent. As part of future planning, there is a need for reliable, consistent interpretation groups, as they also support additional tasks like organising the projector, which made facilitation easier.
To Centre People’s Languages is to Practice Liberation
The hegemony of colonial languages continues to function as an instrument of domination and enforced submission, preventing many peasant and working-class African women from actively participating in political processes regarding their lives. Through deliberately integrating different languages into the WLL space in Uganda, WoMin not only acknowledged this injustice, but also enabled participants to voice their opinions and deepen their understanding around the issues shaping their communities.
An important consideration in WLL is the centrality of women’s voices and experiences, which remains at the heart of any feminist organising or movement building effort. When local languages are welcomed in the room, the women can co-create the learning space and speak from positions of clarity and confidence.
An African Ecofeminist Popular Education approach must center local languages as a strategy to not only confront oppressive power, but also to build and sustain women’s collective power.
This blog is part of a series highlighting the work of the Popular Education facilitators that supported this course.
