This special edition of Perspectives reflects on, analyzes and documents the evolution of African feminisms and feminist action that African activists have taken up to address both old as well as persistent and new threats to women’s rights and gender justice. It also reflects on lessons learned from African feminist practices for current and future generations across the region.
Stella Nyanzi’s No Roses From My Mouth includes 159 poems written in 2019 and 2020 from Luzira Women’s Prison in Kampala, Uganda during a trial and serving time for cyber-harassing and offending the President of Uganda, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni in a poem where she uses his dead mother’s vagina as an image to comment on her son’s "oppression, suppression and repression" of Ugandans. This poetry collection includes poems "written by an activist who uses the space of incarceration and the time of detention to reflect on the conditions of being incarcerated itself", the position of the woman in society, and the political conditions of the Ugandan state.
The Hollywood action movie Black Panther captured the imagination of audiences around the globe. In several African countries, it quickly became the highest grossing film of all time. The tale is set in Wakanda, a technologically advanced African kingdom that avoided the shackles of colonialism and slavery by isolating itself behind a guise of poverty and deprivation. Although what it presents as “African”, in terms of narrative and images, is far from uncontested, the film catapulted Afrofuturism – a discipline or aesthetic that enlists science fiction and technology to imagine black identities and futures unconstrained by past and present circumstances – from the avant-garde circles of artists and intellectuals into the mainstream.
Over the last five decades, successive African governments have promised their citizens dignity, equality, human rights and a better life. However, progress to achieve these ideals remains hampered in various respects, of which gender inequality is undoubtedly one of the most severe.
