There’s a photo in my phone that always features as the latest picture in my album, even though I downloaded it in June 2017. A silvery black and white image from Khadija Saye’s dwelling: in the space we breathe. A woman bending over as a spirit-like form performs a healing…

This reading list accompanies the Istagram takeover I did on Emma Dabiri’s DisobedientBodies where I epxlore African feminist resistance to violence against women. Citing African feminists is disobedience! African women are literally written out of the history of the world. By citing we write ourselves back in. …

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…

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…

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. It…

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…

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. …

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…

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…