If I’m honest, 2020 hurt. There were days when death hung like smog over whole cities. Days, months of death. Ty died. Kobby’s brother Ebow died. So many friends and aunties and grandparents died. Large sections of the world experienced the constraint of limited movement and loss of physical community. COVID19 is most certainly real and most definitely contagious, we had to stay at home (if we could). Still, it doesn’t remove the slow emotional atrophy of a life reduced to an ever decreasing physical geography. Sure, many turned to digital landscapes to go for a drink, a conference, a…

Its approaching New Years. Not just any new year, but 2020, the start of a new decade in the colonially imposed Gregorian calendar, and of course a year that inspires constant allusion to clarity of vision. 2020 is after all perfect sight.

Perhaps its that I have astigmatism in both eyes and so my vision will never really be 20:20, or the that fact that I work in a universe of donors and funding that is persistently and unashamedly obsessed with ‘results’. Perhaps its that I was raised in a left feminist philosophical tradition that is founded on notions of…

It is 30 years since World AIDS Day was first commemorated, propelled by a global surge of frontline activism. Today it feels urgent to recall that era in Africa — when treatment access was a dream, and stigma and emotional violence were the dominant responses to HIV and AIDS. …

African feminists have been producing knowledge for centuries. Finding it however has not always been easy. Until the internet age, diverse African feminist thought and praxis has been notoriously hard to access. Many feminists of my generation remember hours spent in the catalogues of university libraries searching desparately for texts written by African women whose historical experience spoke to ours. There was nothing like the pleasure of finding analysis about a context or issue produced by someone who actually knew it intimately as hier to its legacy — and not just as an external observer of it.

Having been a…

This International Day of the Girl Child is an emotional one for me as I hold my own tiny daughter, the resilient and yet thoroughly dependant being that she is at this stage of life. To parent a girl is to be reminded that it is the responsibility of us- of adults- to protect, to nourish, to defend, and to open the window out into a beautiful world for every little girl.

My daughter gives me a new opportunity to practice revolutionary love. And that, of course, means loving her enough to want to refuel my feminist fire and keep…

A human rights activist friend once commented that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is far more interesting if read backwards. And indeed if you do so then six articles in you arrive at this beauty of a legal standard:

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. – Article 24, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On 1 May every year the world commemorates International Worker’s Day with parades and speeches celebrating wage labourers. Interestingly, this exuberant focus on sweat and exertion eclipses the very genesis of the day…

Feeling adrift a few weeks ago, I started reading Anam Cara- Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, a classic by Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue. I had seen a verse of his referenced by South African feminist poet Toni Stuart and was intrigued to explore. As the text unfolded so did my heart, as I began to consider the role of friendship in my life, the state of my soul, and the meaning behind the book’s central theme of anam cara, a Gaelic word meaning “soul friend”. …