DECOLONIAL FEMINISMS: A Transdisciplinary African Feminist Conversation
Abstract
- Abstract
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This Afro-Feminist Round Table will engage with decolonial feminism from francophone and anglophone African perspectives with a view to generating valuable insights in intersectional and decolonial epistemic frames pertinent to the Cluster’s agenda of reconfiguring African Studies. This intergenerational, transdisciplinary conversation has been is a sharing of thoughts and teachings from the speakers‘ diverse situated standpoints.
Decolonial feminisms are epistemic frames to name and address all modes of systemic oppression. The conceptual tools implemented mobilize the knowledges produced by racialised women in the Global South throughout history, whereby transformative justice informs decolonial feminist visions.
Knowledge production by racialised women has for the most part been about articulating life worlds and situated knowledges which have otherwise been consigned to the margins, dehumanised and/or erased. These knowledges form the bases of knowledge currently produced by Global South women scholars and activists working for much-needed transformative justice and life-affirming visions of futures.
Moreover, decolonial feminism generate modes of care and hope as viable frams for envisioning African Futures for both established and early career scholars.
Roundtable participants:
Dr. Fatou Sow (sociologist and education scientist; Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar, Senegal and Centre National de Recherches Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France)
Prof. Ousseina Alidou (African Literatures and Languages; Rutgers University, USA)
Prof. Akosua Adomako Ampofo (sociologist, African and Gender Studies scholar; University of Legon, Accra, Ghana)
Prof. Francoise Verges (political scientist and historian; Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris, France)
Chair:
Dr. Christine Vogt-William, Director GDO, Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth
The roundtable is designed as a pre-event for the award ceremony of the honorary doctorate for Dr. Fatou Sow later the same evening. It will be streamed online and may be attended via Zoom.
For more info please download the flyer.
If you would like to join the event via zoom please register with africamultiple-gdo@uni-bayreuth.de
Origins & context
- Title
- DECOLONIAL FEMINISMS: A Transdisciplinary African Feminist Conversation
- Language
- English
- YouTube playlist
- ICDL - Events by the GDO of the Cluster
- Date
- June 1, 2022
Identifiers & sources
Full text
- Transcript
- [Music] so good morning again bonjour to le monde i was asked to say a few words to open this event today my name is rudiger zeisermann i'm the spokesperson of the africa multiple cluster of excellence and under the umbrella of the cluster dr christine ford william convened this event today and yeah what can i say i think it is a really exceptional event [Music] i was expecting our invitees to be already on the podium so that you can see them but you will see them in a moment and if you see them i think you will realize that their presence speaks for itself i cannot claim to have attended so many um afro-feminist or decolonial feminist events but i still dare to say that this group has never come together we have four actually scholarly giants whom you will see in a moment and here in a moment and i really don't want to take away a lot of time but i want to say this the most senior of them dr fartuso will officially receive the honorary doctorate from the university of byroid tonight the big sus honorary doctorate and this is the occasion um on which doctor william convened this round table and when fatouzou was a student at the university of dakar i was an infant in the 1960s in germany and one of my sons recently one of my young young sons recently pulled out a very old photo album with pictures in black and white and he said dad i'm really glad that i'm not born in the 60s because the world was still black and white and this is for me more than an anecdote because it also highlights how we see the world and what i find particularly inspiring about the scholarship that our distinguished guests are doing as well as the scholarship dr ford william is doing that it opens up new perspectives on how we see the world i sometimes feel what i see is 2d in through my uh how should i say conventional lenses that i use in my work and um you cannot actually see clearly a 3d movie unless you wear 3d viewing glasses and i believe that these feminist women studies intersectional perspectives help us to see a 3d movie with 3d viewing classes and this is why i tremendously appreciate and respect and value the work you are doing and i will leave it at that and i would like to ask the audience to welcome our guests with a huge applause and hand over the mic [Applause] to professor andrea barens the big sus um spokesperson and vice dean of early korean equal opportunity in the africa multiple cluster of excellence thanks thank you very much as rudiger already announced me let me just say that this round table is also of highest relevance for a socially just higher education landscape it is also of importance for the concerns and the joy for our young scholars themselves and for the legacies that they are crafting for young people of future generations i should also say that this conversation today is in a view of the agenda and the commitments of our cluster africa multiple and its commitment to the reconfiguration of african studies that rudy gazeman has also mentioned before i hand over to christine william let me just introduce also our dear host and organizer and convener of this round table dr fucht william is a scholar in literary and cultural studies her untiring work focuses on postcolonial and gender studies which she has taught at several universities in germany in berlin frankfurt munster freiburg augsburg and recently together with me also in byroid and together with other professors she holds the position the important position of the director of the cluster's gender and diversity office and i personally admire how she is invested in finding ways of combining her exciting and innovative innovative work with the scholarship that she has built up and which also i should say lies at the heart of the cluster's work of reconfiguring african studies with this i'm happy to pass the word to my dear colleague and friend dr christine fold william thank you very much thank you thank you for those very kind words professor zizman our cluster dean thank you very much also to the vice dean of early career and equal opportunity and the spokesperson of big sus professor andrea berens for these kind words and for actually being here we all know if you want to have good things you got to be there for good things so i'm very very glad to welcome you to this event um i hope you all have something to eat and drink and you're comfortable in your seats indeed yes we we aim to cater for all our needs here right this is an academic pre-event to tonight's conferral of the big sus honorary doctorate on professor fatouzou which will take place on campus at the university of byroid and i hope to see many of you there this evening the round table itself will engage with decolonial feminisms from francophone and anglophone african feminist perspectives with a view to generating valuable insights in intersectional and decolonial epistemic frames pertinent to the cluster's agenda of reconfiguring african studies this intergenerational transdisciplinary conversation has been envisioned as a sharing of thought impulses from the speakers diverse situated standpoints of their positionalities their work their disciplines it is to it is to be hoped that these african feminist and scholarly engagements will contribute to significant impulses to drive forward the cluster's agenda of reconfiguring african studies now at this point i would like to ask our speakers oops to please come to your uh seats on the table around the table and my dears we have african feminist giant scholars in the house in the house [Applause] [Applause] okay i'm hoping that the mic is on the mic is on yes thank you so much i'd like to thank our technicians in the back they've been very kind to wire us up making us fit for the 21st century thank you so much right okay i will begin by introducing our speakers you will have the opportunity to uh listen to a few of their shall we say achievements in basically setting up this field i'd like to begin with theoretical linguist usina alidu she is professor at the department of african middle eastern and south asian languages and literatures and the graduate program in comparative literature she traveled to the u.s from nigeria in 1988 to continue her education going on to receive her doctorate in theoretical linguistics from indiana university bloomington professor ali du has published widely on women's orality and literacy practices in african muslim societies african muslim women's agency and gender justice african women's literatures gender discourses of identity and the politics of cultural production in african muslim societies us has been a member of the african studies association since 1994. she has also held previous appointments and services that include the chair of all african studies programs usa 2009-2011 director of the center of african studies at rutgers university 2009 to spring 2015 she's the current president of the african studies association uh from 2021 to 2022 and she is currently faculty director at the center for women's global leadership yeah from uh 2021 right okay till now that's right she taught at several american universities including the university of illinois at urbana-champaign the ohio state university ohio university cleveland state university she was a visiting professor at the university of hamburg in germany the university of luneburg in germany a visiting professor at the university abdul mumuni in the republic of niger she's won several awards for her scholarship and service amongst them the obafemi awolovo center of for gender and social policy studies she received the distinguished visiting scholar service award in 2015 the carnegie african diaspora fellowship award in 2015 and the newark women in the media distinguished community service award 2015. our next speaker is professor ado marco ampofo she's professor of african uh and gender studies at the institute of african studies at the university of ghana in accra considering herself an activist scholar akusua's in areas of interest include african knowledge systems higher education race and identity politics gender relations masculinities and popular culture in her current work on black masculinities she explores the shifting nature of identities among young men in africa and the diaspora another project an archive of activism gender and public history in post-colonial ghana seeks to in constitute a publicly access accessible archive of and documentary on gender activism and political women in post-colonial ghana she's doing this with kate skinner from the university of birmingham funded by the british academy currently the documentary when women speak was premiered in january twenty twenty two ado marco ampufo is editor-in-chief of the contemporary journal of african studies and the co-editor of critical investigations into humanitarian to humanitarianism in africa blog she serves on a number of boards in several organizations including the u.s african studies association the center for the advanced advancement of scholarship at the university of pretoria africa multiple cluster excellence university of byroid perivoli africa research center at the university of bristol the institute for of four humanities in africa huma university of cape town among the various appointments she has held akusua from that foundation director at the center for gender studies and advocacy at the university of ghana and the immediate past president of the african studies association of africa she's an honorary professor at the center for african studies at the university of birmingham she's also a fellow of the ghana academy of arts and sciences amongst the various awards she has received i mention junior fulbright scholar a new century fulbright scholar and a senior fulbright scholar in residence so she's a fulbright favorite yeah in 2010 she was awarded the feminist activism award by sociologists for women and society francoise veges is an anti-racist an anti-capitalist decolonial feminist who was born in paris but thinks of herself as someone la from from la reunion island and algeria veges centers her postcolonials centers her work on postcolonial studies and decolonial feminism she has published extensively in french and english on themes ranging from postcolonial theory realization psychoanalysis the racial anthropocene slavery and colonial memorials museums and feminism the economy of predation to franz fanon and emmy cesia first studied to become a journalist after having worked as a journalist and editor in the women's liberation movement in france she moved to the u.s in 1983 and received her bachelor degree in political science and women's studies with summa laude from the university of california in san diego in a phd in political sciences from berkeley university in 1995. she has taught at sussex university and goldsmith's college in london in england francois veges has written over 10 books and produced two films on emmy cecilia and maurice conde and she's an independent curator who's notably organized exhibitions at the louvre regulating regularly collaborating with artists she's the co-founder and president of the collective decolonized the arts and of the free and open university decolonizing the arts between 2014 and 2019 she was curator of la talie a regular workshop on collective art and performance for artists and scholars veges became a member of the committee for the remembrance and history of slavery in 2004. i have the french title here but i'm not going to bother you or torture you with my bad french and she was also the president uh she was also the president of this committee from 2009 to 2012. between 2003 and 2010 she had developed the scholarly and cultural program for a museum for the 21st century on the island of la reunion she is also a member of several institutions working to prevent discrimination and racism she sits on the board of the gallery between salon i pardon my french please and on the scientific council of the foundation lilian turam again pardon veges was also chair holder of the global south chair at the college de tudis mondiales from 2014 to 2018. in 2019 french publishers la fabrique edition brought out her most recent book unfeminism colonial please found the part of the french which is translated by veges and ashley j bora in english in 2021 as a d colonial feminism and for this she received the english english pen translates award this year pluto press is publishing francoise veges's new work a feminist theory of violence now last but not least i will receive save the best for last i like doing that we have fafatuso born in dakar in 1941 senegalese feminist sociologist fatuso she's renowned as one of the first of a generation of african women researchers who after independence gave voice to african women and their issues dr so received a baccalaureate in sociology from the university of dakar and completed a doctorate in sociology at the university paris sabon she did her research director hablitazion from the university paris did a room doctor so was attached as a researcher to the santro nationale de la recherchiante cnrs in paris excuse the french once more while based at the university of dakar for 30 years her long-standing career has involved teaching lecturing and other engagements in africa europe and north america together with aisha imam and amina mama she set up the gender institute at the council for the development of social science research in africa also known as cadestria for which she has also been a trainer among her various appointments she has acted as president of the reproductive health research network in francophone africa from 1992 to 1996 as coordinator for francophone africa of the network development with women for a new era dawn 1995-2007 and she's currently a member of the board of trustees there as an international coordinator for the feminist transnational solidarity network women living under muslim laws wluml from 2008 to 2018. she's also a member of the scientific committee of cadesria she's published extensively on the importance of feminist scholarship and african social sciences secularism in sub-saharan states francophone feminist research religion gender and fundamentalism her research interests and activism have always centered on the rights and equality of women in honor of this impressive trajectory dr soh is the second recipient of the big sas honorary doctorate from the university of byroid after the kenyan writer and academic professor mugi watiango in 2014 so with that you have an idea of the immense immense amount of wisdom that is sitting on that stage between them about 120 years of insightful scholarship can i please hear it again for them in the house [Applause] okay now let's get to the business at hand before we start the conversation i want to give a rather chat a few significant aspects of the colonial feminist scholarship that are pertinent to our conversation today while we would all doubtless agree that this roundtable is relevant for our current times the substance of decolonial feminism has been the subject of discussion since the 2000s if not earlier indeed ugandan feminist legal scholar silvia tamale has observed from the 1980s interventions by african feminists challenging knowledge production and pedagogy within universities were the inaugural decolonial projects on the continent an example of such an intervention that sprang from such decolonial efforts is that by fatuso aisha imam and amina mama when they organized the first cadestria feminist colloquium on gender analysis in 1991 the proceedings of which were published as the seminal gender studies volume engendering african social sciences published in 1997. this collective of feminist scholars who published this seminal volume have basically said gender studies at the core of this enterprise and i need to extend my personal thanks to fatu here for being part of that group of african feminist visionaries um in in in your own 1997 contribution on the social sciences in africa and gender analysis you list some of the inaugural decolonial projects on the continent now you speak of a good 20 years of specifically african thought by organizations of women students and activists win a ward cams uh sayaf and wluml to cite just a few and yet you point out in universities and african research institutions we must still defend the legitimacy of agenda approach as a category for understanding and explaining social other approaches that accentuate class race or caste interests political economic or cultural factors in africa itself the contemporary debate about women is many-sided the terms and concepts used the stakes disputed and the objectives sort take on new forms and expressions that vary with the era context cultural atmosphere and interests at work and indeed that the defense of the legitimacy of gender studies and universities is still necessary today in the 21st century is one that bears some scrutiny where one does wonder the level of hostility demonstrated when you think about our efforts at objectivity towards scholarship but i'll just leave that there one significant global south scholar of the early 2000s who has theorized on decolonial feminism began with the idea of the coloniality of gender this is argentinian feminist philosopher activist and professor of comparatively separable axis of the capitalist world system and modernity in terms of the coloniality of power and its workings and here lugoni says unlike colonization the coloniality of gender is still with us it is what lies at the intersection of gender class race as central constructs of the capitalist world system of power thinking about the coloniality of gender enables us to think of historical beings only one-sidedly understood as oppressed i suggest that we focus on the beings who resist the coloniality of gender from the colonial difference gender does not travel away resistance the coloniality of gender is thus historically complex the coloniality of gender enables me to understand the oppressive imposition as a complex interaction of economic racializing and gendering systems in which every person in the colonial encounter can be found as a live historical fully described being here points out colonial mechanisms of oppression in power relations while pointing out modes of agency and challenging the same identifying the coloniality of gender then is a necessary part of our scholarship as lugono lugonis thinks it is against this backdrop that lagos then moves for moves toward a decolonial feminism in terms of the relation between resistance or resistant response to the coloniality of gender and decoloniality being set up here rather than being answered and coloniality lugonis goes to some effort to define such resistance when she says one does not resist the coloniality of gender alone one resists it from within a way of understanding the world and living in it that is shared and that can understand one's actions thus providing recognition communities rather than individuals enable the doing one does with someone else not in individualist isolation what modes of resistance then he have taken place on the part of colonized peoples how have colonized women proffered resistance against the imposition of gender norms that one that are in congruent with indigenous concepts and conceptualizations of gender while there is much more to say about the coloniality of gender it is the idea of resistance which reverberates through ugandan feminist legal studies scholar sylvia tamales 2020 work decolonization and afrofeminism where she states when engendering knowledge discourse and knowledge production feminists have to be careful not to fall into the trap of projecting african women as hapless victims of a totalizing patriarchal capitalist oppression the fact is that women like all oppressed groups have agency and always engage in some form of resistance many times with a lot of creativity tamales in-depth engagement with the colonial feminism situates numerous concerns and theorized systemic scope of african studies among them the basics of decolonization and decolonial futures feminists and the struggle of africa's decolonial reconstruction challenges to the coloniality of sex gender and sexuality rethinking the african academy here i would like to mention dr fato so's enthusiasm for tamales seminal work and this took place at a digital round table on decolonization and black women's knowledge last summer in the cluster where dr so was one of two prominent discussions and permit me to quote a pithy observation here from the transcript of that round table i read sylvia tamale's book in its entirety i had the privilege of being asked by her to blog about her book i took notes so i could express my appreciation and admiration for this extraordinary book which is a source for all for us all to deconstruct colonization and decolonization and to show what the links and impacts for us all to deconstruct colonization and sorry and show what links and impacts were there that are still persistent i think it is extremely important to measure this process against what we ourselves have done with decolonization we are after all 60 years after independence if today we complain about colonization it is because we have a real problem and i think that future generations will hold us to account for not having resolved these contradictions in which we have lived and survived and which we should have changed by now this would merit some uh reflection in our conversation and we could ask what kinds of community are envisioned in the decolonial feminism by uh african feminists how are the colonial feminist communities built and sustained and how do communities affect resistance and move towards change aside from lugonius and tamale's work we've got yet another recent work on decolonial feminism that con merits considerable with its thought provoking ideas francoise veges 2021 work decolonial feminism wishes to be your contribution to be the struggles and the critique of civilizational feminism and i'm excited to have you here with us francis uh to consider some of these matters aside from critique in coloniality and eurocentricism francoise your perspectives on decolonial feminist work entails studying how the conflicts of racism sexism ethnocentrism pervades all relations domination when the regimes associated with these phenomena have disappeared you go on to delineate the connections between scholarly and activist care work indeed colonial feminisms which can function and as vision for the future the colonial feminisms draw on theories and practices that women have forged over time in anti-racist anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles helping to expand theories of liberation and emancipation around the world at the same time this aspect of community does not avoid the differences in feminist positionality it articulates modes of resistance against being raised silenced and edited out of history francois says the right writing the past and the history of racialized women has not had the same trajectory as european feminist writing because it has not followed the same process for racialized women it is not about filling a void it is about finding the words to breathe life into that which has been condemned to non-existence worlds that have been cast out of humanity and with that i end my contribution to this field of thought impulses here and we could start with the conversation um the first point that perhaps we could bring in here is that a conceptual tools which are implemented in decolonial feminisms like coloniality of gender afro-feminism and intersectionality they mobilize knowledges produced by racialized women in the global south throughout history and whereby transformative justices informs these visions so could you please share with us how might theorizations using decolonial feminist lenses in your respective disciplines lead to modes of epistemic transformative justice what kinds of changes have you seen in your careers who would like to begin i'll go with them yes an example of work that my senior sister techchua menu now emerita professor at the institute of afghan studies at the university of ghana and i did in the 90s and she had been invited by i think it was the ghana statistical services to make some commentary on the census and the ways in which data collected and we were particularly troubled by the way in which the household was composed right it it has these you know the sensors built into it the assumption of the nuclear family and we know that our families are very diverse many of the families are not monogamous legally so so and we were very much impressed by the work of the nigerian feminist scholar felicia ekeduba who has this text um i wrote the title down somewhere anyway yeah it's um women centered have holes in rural west africa yeah this is a 1995 text and she argues that instead of measuring the household around husband wife and children the household should be measured around a health hold around the cooking pot in other words the woman and her children because the man might move around especially if he has more than one wife so you know the whole notion at the time of this european construction of a family which actually is not even accurate for europe but we can leave that for now informed uh responses to their statistical services about how one should start thinking about the household and so even though we haven't come as far as we want to one of the questions that i asked in the senses about you know where you spent the night so this then allows different households of especially if a man belongs to more than one household it allows them to be captured separately around the woman and her children and um you know we we saw this as a very important contribution towards you know destabilizing the notion of family and um you know even the the notion of housewife we have to have had to keep you know telling our students and and it's very informative when you you know at the beginning of the semester we teach an introduction to african studies course at the university of ghana that every student has to take and there's a gender component and you ask students you know what do your mother what does your mother do what does your father do to get into a conversation and you often hear my mother is just a housewife and then you start asking them to unpack what it is she does and you find that apart from all the reproductive work that she does in the home she's also doing economic activity that's bringing money onto the table and you know real income in other ways so you know these are just some examples of the way we've tried we've tried to trouble you know set notions received notions of family of wife or mother of head of household of housewife and all of these to to complicate them and to show that they are they are received from you know a european cultural setting and they were not true especially when you ask students okay how about your grandmother then they begin to think and it's like aha actually this model this conceptual framework um doesn't fit into that so one example thank you thank you [Applause] the public to this discourse i try to answer to this presentation from christine because at the same time she gives the questions the answers analyze and we have to try to pick out through her speech how we can react i think that i started at a time where women were not studying to work on a question which is a non-question a non-subject in a university in the 60s was a challenge it took me many years not only in the european way to show a woman not only as a as a housewife what when you when you do as a society [Music] and the woman housewife even if they are doing a handcraft if they transform oil if they transform a fish if they grow because they have these possibilities just the fact to deconstruct this image of just being a housewife has been something very very important for me it has been a very important tool for this student i was at that time seeing scholars mostly men french but more often senegalese okay where i can where i realized that they were a battery occurred patrick at that time we were not talking about feminists at that time because it was like a swear word but it is still is but we have the possibility to define new notions in a contradictory way because we had a way of to bring african women to another level they are raw products and at the same time we are trapped by this reproduction rule where the women are just in their own praying children of giving birth so we have those two other different positions scientific patriarchate occidental and african and as a woman we are here and we fight around the idea that at that time was very difficult to express and that we managed to transform in a discuss what i call feminist you can call it black feminist afro african feminist in africa it is a new way of thinking this new way of thinking is something that i have been constructed it took me 20 years and i don't want to lose it i think that in the decline is a feminism we have those roots those roots of the feminists to measure it but to open it to to the path of africa and what the fuss in africa has done for the woman in a good way bad way in a very bad way and the contracts are something to define a woman in africa not only a woman as a mother thank you okay so i like our our cyber selves right now the translation devices are very very important here that's great usain would you like to vote next thank you um professor uh christine vogg and i want to start first by saying uh greetings to everybody and to the greater byroid community i'm grateful to be among the greatest thanks to your community it is really a historical milestone to have this transgenerational initiative and we are forever grateful once upon a time one will say as a as a scholar coming from the sahel when i grow up i want to be like somebody and to have one's dream come true by being sitting next to that one once wants to be like that like her is really a great owner mercy professor fatiso it is a great honor from byron university to create this opportunity to be in the presence of greatness the ones who plant the seed for some western academy to say we have a voice and to also her sister for a cross-generation professor francois vargas to be here it is humbling and to my sister next madam president it is a great owner and that is only possible because we are in a great institutions which believe in africa and african women within the continent and the diaspora so byroid university we are grateful to you thank you so the challenge you pose us which is an invitation for a conversation my sister christine is to put us into a conversation a long time to to do the traveled the historical time to look at what history has done history of coloniality and then to look at what the post the so-called post-colonial has done and then for us to imagine futures futures that are created with gaps in his in theory so what we call the colonial theory since we have our great mothers in our presence the question for me as a linguist a theoretical linguist operating within a department of comparative literature and also operating with an african feminist and diaspora feminist trajectory is to ask ourselves if the euro operating within western western centers of knowledge have not marginalized for so long the african women's library of the long jury so how do we construct the theory with gaps when the libraries in indigenous languages in indigenous scripts have not been taken into account because coloniality has a marginalized african women have not defined african women as site of knowledge production so our task if we are to imagine decolonial modernity as privileged elites who are navigating within western epistemologies within western epistemologies in in the west like my i have to interrogate my privileged location i'm i am a feminist african muslim coming from the sahel but operating in the united states so i have to interrogate my my location right my trajectory by look doing the care work which um the colonial feminists um like uh uh uh maria lugunas uh uh like uh cynthia uh winter uh like bell hooks like amina mama like a professor fatu professor verges my sister professor akosua here are asking us to do privilege how do we use our privilege to fill the gaps to go and do the question of reparation reparation by retrieving the african women's library so for instance my work when i wrote the book engaged in modernity muslim women in post-colonial niger is to self-interrogate my myself first right to say what happens to women's library in my own society women who are intellectuals but whose work is not known because they're writing in african languages in ajami or in tiffina because in amazing women are the transmitters of literacy so how come when for instance in the western epistemological framework when we talk about francophone west african women we write them in terms of deficiencies you see so my work as a feminist doing the care work is to do the work of reparation and as a comparative translation as a reparation is to go and retrieve the women's library the women's library are not privileging the hierarchy that was imposed in in terms of hierarchy of what is knowledge system can knowledge system be articulated within african orality within multiple african languages and by african women and being put in conversation with the written world for instance the wonderful work the groundbreaking work of gene boyd anand asmau and beverly mark and sardia omar at the university of sokoto is to go back and retrieve the library of nana asmao binti sheikh usmanda which would do now shakus mandan fodo has written in hausa in fulfilled in tamazek and in arabic but throughout the time that people in the western epistemology western framework were writing about comparative literature until much later in the 90s in the 80s the work of these african women who were writing before colonialism were theorizing what gender is what sexuality is and what does it mean to write within class caste and hierarchy marginalization power relation knowledge system that feminist decolonial feminists operating within western epistemologies like maria lugonos like center winter and where is that library how is it incorporated and also the story of the big man theorists where is the women's library whether it's in orality an indigenous script and in dialogue with what my early sisters were talking about how what is the language when we say elsewhere are african women intellectuals african women theorists writing in indigenous languages describing african women as manager describing the african family in those terms the work of nan asmao bint shep usman damfodio becomes very important when we take the example that professor akosua has mentioned she has produced through the creative space her poetry is really poetry in indigenous african languages written with ajami's script how africans have appropriated the arabic script that comes through the encounter between islamic arab islamic in the west african context to africanize it but to feminize so she has feminized the social caliphate library by pre creating a a a documentation of the lives of women the ordinary women challenging this hierarchy the class and the curse even though she is the daughter of sheikh usmandan for you but each woman's whose biography she presented is to inscribe the critical role as citizen of the new community that is to become what is the role so we know the sociology of women for instance but of of women in the social caliphate by reading non-asthma's poetry how she presents each woman and what she has contributed in commerce in medicine in in politics in political philosophy so theory fiction theory cannot happen without a comparative recuperation of women's orality women's multilingual multi-literacy multi-script african woman inscription and they have carried it in the diaspora as well today most people who are working on west african women through the transatlantic slavery are looking at what have this african women carry moving the body and moving the mind they are working libraries in the ship the transatlantic ship but they have also we have to look at women's library in the mediterranean the african women so slavery has done something in the new world that need to be rethink and do the work of recuperation so this is how for instance thinking decoloniality we have to think of decoloniality of the long duration of the long term the long history of decoloniality that has been taking place by the intellectual history of african women and i'm sure when we go to algeria we go to mauritania we go all the way to south africa or uganda who we have become as african women across our different ethnicity and race will offer a lot to the thick theory thank you thank you and i say amen yes [Applause] well good morning and thank you from being here i'm very honored to be here among my sisters so you asked about i would go back to the question epistemic transformation and transformative justice my approach is more you know from political theory as we say so it's much more it's less you know located and um i was always interested in the way in which uh slave trade and slavery deeply transformed the world and that we still live with the afterlifes of slavery to use their artman expression the way in which effectively racism is still organizing operating in the world you know it's systemic and structural and what we call the north south but i would say that a epistemic transformation as i mean one was very important that it's no longer possible to ignore the work of woman the theoretical work of feminist despite as that would say or the setback no that's not important this does not exist in our language we don't say feminism is a native language it doesn't matter it's there and queer and trans and indigenous women are speaking so this is like this is really and i do think that the reaction the incredible violent reaction of patriarch around the world fascists and restless is also because of this incredible move they are absolutely panicking and when you panic you become very mean and so they are really trying to hold back all the rights i mean we are talking really basic social rights right we are not talking even deeply transformative right right i mean we see them being attacked and they will be attacked they will be attacked so this for me is the both effectively moving never i mean young woman to their extra you know i mean of course we were there before and we were we also fought and with a lot of courage and some of us in fact pay with the lives of being feminists we should not forget that feminism has never been a nice you know lord and sweet and harmonious it's really because you're facing really enemies you are facing enemies enemies is a fatal neoliberalism structural racism imperialism and it's an enemy who is not afraid to kill is not afraid to f you know to fight back and put people in prison or deform you know it's really and we see them in action we shall remember you know maria franco she is killed or even indigenous you know active is being killed and of course all the murder everywhere so we are facing you know and this enemy fabricate vulnerability to premature death as was wilson gilmore aside and we see it also because there is a war a global war against women black women women of color indigenous women there is really a global war they are i mean their lives is being are affected by climate disaster i'm not calling it change climate disaster it are affected by the state of permanent war which is not just bombing you know like bomb but it's poverty it's like no access to public health no access to education no access to water to water i mean the basic you know what does a human being need you know clean water and clean hair you know if you don't breathe you die so i can breathe it's effectively incredible powerful formula not just about police violence but about a world which is made irrespective and therefore you know impossible for us to live in when i wear that today in the global source more people are dying of air pollution than of any other cause of any other cause so polluting the air is you know really targeting the life of people if you don't if i don't breathe i die there is no so the fact that lungs are being attacked you know and also in that point and now even children before being born are affected because their mothers so they are born with respiratory disease which make them even more vulnerable to premature deaths so i see that this is what i call war it's not you know just the bombing and also i see it you know effectively the war against women it's like against of course black women women of color indigenous but also against arab women and against i mean we see the incredible islamophobia in europe and elsewhere and this is also the you know the attack on you of a question like who has the right to live where the right to be protected we see that the protection is not a universal right look at what happened to african women and men in the mediterranean on the border of europe we saw how it was treated differently on the belarus poland border last year and this year again with the war in ukraine wu was a fatal little good refugee and i'm not talking about that the people needing refuge versus a bad refugee the one who will not be excess this is happening today it's not in the past this is happening right now today and this is what we mean by you know the how racism is deeply and how of justice is about attacking neo-liberalism racism and imperialism imperialism and i'm sure that all my sister will agree it's absolutely still you know extracting everything in africa i mean africa is extremely rich and it's poor it's extremely poor i mean except of course a small elite which you know but even that smaller it has no power it's totally corrupted can you know buy so many things in sweden but there's no power really when the master say this is going to be like that you cannot protest because otherwise there will be a coup anywhere and you will so this this for me the the question of transformative justice and what the colonial feminism and for medicalization and i agree with what i say is as finance a historical process it's never finished it will be done perhaps when we would be done with capitalism racism and imperialism you know it would so perhaps we will breathe early and we are doing decolonial step we are doing the colonial act by effectively producing libraries collecting document archive and incredible in terms of production today in cinema for instance from africa it's extraordinary in terms of art is absolutely extraordinary not just of course the young continent but also the diaspora there is also a lot of work about what is a diaspora because there was a hegemony of the united states in terms of diaspora and now you are looking also towards asia you know not just today but you know in the past from me in the indian ocean it's very important because indonesian has always been a you know a cultural space between africa and asia long before the european arrived you know long europeans were late in the year so there are something that of course as you were saying you we could retrieve about travel dayaway you know like pilgrims and people you know and that so they are not also determined just as slaves they were cellos they were you know americans they were you know so this is also a challenging of course the eu centered narrative on the global history and more and more work is being done and of course today about migration what does it mean but the question of migration so are you know what they are not just victims they transform the world where they go but at the same time there is a fabrication of migration that made people vulnerable you know and the incredible extraction of care also you know how care is an extractive industry because the west need women to take care of the elderly and the children and everything and you know you as you say you have more filipina nurses outside of the philippines than in the philippines and more effectively i mean all the african you know working in lebanon or elsewhere african women and we talk about domesticity but there is also sex work you know and so in the way how still the the black non-white body is still you know nourishing the white body making the life of the white body possible by taking care feeding cleaning the house you know offering sex work for the husband so the wife can you know go doing tennis or whatever and you know so this is really an economy and a really a deep economy of extraction and exhaustion and that economy of exertion is really it started with a slave trade and then with colonization in africa extraction both of the land but also of the body you exhaust the body to premature death we know that the slave and the end slave could you know was eight to ten years of life on the plantation i'm not going you know expectancy that could not be expediency no longer than that so you have to win you and what do we see today in on the con african continent children and sons life is really very like narrow and that's part of the economy of exhaustion exhausting you know extracting so for me the colony is a recognization one of the tasks today is really attacking that economy of exhaustion and extraction how do we understand extraction not just of course the mining which is course of what before mining rubber mining peanuts in senegal and transforming you know desertifying senegal but also today extracting everything that we need for our phone but also still extracting the life force still extracting the life force so there is really on on the global you know scale today and africa is because of his incredible wealth you know being absolutely constantly extracted and exhausted and women effectively uh are also and i'm not talking as a victim but they are more i mean their life is more difficult because of also climate disaster before that they will walk two kilometer to get to fetch water now it's i don't know eight or whatever uh the life is much more so how do we attack that economy which is an economy of depleting life so how the colonial feminism is also about affirming the politics of life has affected the political the possibility of breathing you know breathing as a as a decolonial right you know and of of course and making the world that where you can breathe breathable and also habitable because capitalism the world and inevitable and we see it also with the eat waves in on the african continent right now and you know the fact that how so you know there is moment so this construction of an in a you know an inhabitable uh place and i'm not saying planet there's no planetary here you know here we can breathe nonetheless right and there are measured to say okay don't go out it's pretty annoying and then fine against industry even though you know it's still a lot to be done but and the last things i will say also that for medical and feminism is fighting against militarization because the military industry is an anti-feminist industry if you have army you have soldiers if you have soldiers you have rape you have destruction you have devastation so how do we how deconfeminism can theorize a politic of peace which is not this piece that is being talked about by men around the table and it's just you know short interlude between two walls right so they suddenly agree okay let's have some peace for now and then in the meantime we're going to build more you know tanks but you know whatever submarine and instead of investing in education and health and everything when i see for instance you know some african state buying weapon you know like billion and you don't even have you know public health clinic in in water and water and clean water so uh militarization is an invisible enemy for whatever reason because it and and effectively the the one ukraine has brought i mean for europe and they remember now that what is war but for people in the global south war has never stopped yes um okay we've had just like i mean okay you all i'm just like sitting i'm taking notes i'm learning right okay seminar right i hope you're all taking notes okay um i'm serious these are opportunities which are worth their weight in gold and like i said i'm learning um with with what you have just basically set out you also um brought in the the question of care right care work care politics each of you has very very cogently from your own disciplinary position uh you know basically brought in how care is being conceptualized and how care is being economized right how care is also attached to certain bodies and has been also intersectionally instrumentalized to shape those bodies and the readings of those bodies so we have here care work is being understood and articulated in the cultural political emotional intellectual anti-racist labor of racialized and gendered bodies both in academic and non-academic contexts and i would also i hope i can catch that slide here because again this is something that i like to work with where in 2015 aaron martin natasha myers and anna visio said knowing requires requires caring about how one knows what and how one knows we assert that the politics of knowledge cannot be disarticulated from a politics of care right we have these elements of engagement and responsibility right so they say to disavow care would be to leave intact binaries that circumscribe realms of legitimate and illegitimate knowledge and the pervasive bifurcations that prioritize the rationale over the sensory and affective dimensions of knowledge foregrounding care and its fraught politics is then one way to stay with the trouble and to take situated knowledge seriously i think this is something i would like to keep on bringing into the conversation you've already brought it in can we sort of look at how decolonial feminism might generate modes of care and hope when when we talk about care as well i like to also always have that that shadowy dimension of hope that's in the background that that will also come to the fore how do we how do we as uh you know use our rather read decolonial feminism as generating modes of care and hope as viable frames for envisioning african futures both for established and for early career scholars and i i would like to bring the conversation to how we do this in our university spaces right for me for example all right you might call me in advance of some level of a scholar of some advanced years and i'm here and i'm in the presence of pioneers like yourself who've laid out the work we are still doing the work right now and but there are people coming after us so can we just talk about how this sort of generates um you know knowledge but where knowledge can also be a place of hope and care for those who are coming after us and of course for those who are still doing the work okay um okay thank you um professor williams and christine sister i want to give you an example a small example of care for me in the field of knowledge production and the work of repression to inscribe the contribution of african and black women no matter which planet we are on i've given the immediate example i am so in my training often say you are a linguist how come you are in a critical theory i'm like it's precisely because i'm a linguist that i have to be in critical theory to inscribe women black women african women contribution to what is called theory and philosophizing but the care the hope is when we it is an the care in the field of knowledge production is an ethical demand it requires ethical consciousness it is not about what title we get it is the work of ethics to repair that which was not allowed to be and that is still present what professor and google what young say making the visible invisible right so for instance the work of professor fatouzou by virtue of language because it is articulated in french we were discussing earlier with professor verges because it's articulated in a language that in the us the english dominance shadowed put her work in the margins right so it is ethical for me not to tell rice without saying by the way there is the library of dr fatu so that's how i look at the ethics of it in my work many senior women instance i give you the example of i wrote a social biography of a great intellectual malama aisha today chandra who writes in hausa but in ajami her ethnicity is not hausa she's zarma sangra but she went to the school afro-islamic school in ajami and hausa was the longer franca for that school throughout the time i was doing research on her she came when the first time i met her she said where are you from i say i'm from here so what do you want i heard her poem in a taxi in near me and the poem the title of the poem is called ilmi ilimi meaning knowledge and i was so struck by this secular poem but framed within afro-islamic epistemology that challenge anybody who does not want to send a child especially the girl child to school in our terrorizing we consider people like malama aisha to dance we have not considered her library then but her intervention with the democratization process has given her a place to challenge those who were reproducing a classical poem with mistake and she taught okay it is my duty as an intellectual to come and tell this ulama that they're allowing in the islamic radio program to produce a classical text with gaps and with mistakes i have the original text that's how she came to radio and that's how me i find her in a taxi listening to her poem i have to have humility to understand oh my god my training did not allow me to understand her library and her philosophizing about what knowledge is by producing this poem in that challenge elite especially patriarchal elites which do not deconstruct coloniality of education to see that people like her exist and can serve society throughout the time i was working to produce her social biography i went back and forth back and forth from u.s tunisia there's one day she told me go open this curtain because most of the time we will meet like this at home and then she has her her quranic school we will meet i will do my interview her veranda or write her salon but she never told me she had her private library right there one day she said my daughter can you take something for me i said oh yes malama i said what is it she said lift that curtain i lift it is a bedroom filled with books filled with books and she said okay i see you have been coming back and forth now it is yours my private library i never knew this woman who was born in the 1930s had a private library right there but when she saw i was serious about really what she stand and her legacy she thought okay i can inherit her library and so what i did because the knowledge system that that library has to have a feature has to be shared today we are talking about her right what i did is i said oh it is not to be it is not about me she has given me a gift to take care the same way she has taken care of the gift that she was received across generations so what i did i went to indonesia we have the institute of arabic and ajami manuscript the director is a historian professor mumuni i say i have to make a witness there is a heritage that must be preserved you are doing digitization producing the the works of the checks i appreciate that but there is a shaker next to us and her library needs to be protected and it is a responsibility of this institution to make sure that she's counted in a way that was not counted before and she is a decolonial feminist african woman black woman and women for the universe who want her knowledge to be shared so that to me is the work of care it is ethical consciousness to reveal that which was not allowed to be because of coloniality [Applause] usain it is extraordinary that we have described african women writing in africa and we have a few volumes about history of women in africa and women writing history north africa in western sahara south africa i think there are five volumes and in these volumes we give the women the way to tell this story there are actors but it is history which is not mentioned in any book encyclopedia i know that unesco published in the last 20 years an encyclopedia of african history and i was asked in the ninth volume after 10 000 pages i should write something about africa which would allow to see how women participate in making of history i think it is very important because it was not in the uh 10 volumes there are actors as mao is mentioned she writes in arabic but these women belong to the elite but ordinary women what they do in wretching history is something we have to collect and reproduce and know that they've read um history of women israel two friend of mine wrote this chapter they collected these stories but there are several levels there is indigenous knowledge not only indigenous knowledge but it's also about plants our cereals are transformed fruit and agricultural products are transformed how textile are made how life is created and maintained and i think it is very important because women do the history they are not only figures a princess you write about a princess which were not made for women but women were in the pre-colonial era our system it is around the uh transmission by women we transmit power to our sons nephews my brothers have more trust in women than others and this system is very important because we talked a lot about the way of women to trans fair power but at what price and how do we retrieve this uh part of history and i think this part of history will retrieve it but we have to interregate what is the body of a woman i heard a few phrases and my masculine colleagues are shocked and other colleagues say stop my body is mine and this body which is mine is in the middle of care maybe it's the way we have to help younger generations young women but i think we have to start inside the family and we have to ask ourselves who are we decide upon our body and our personality and to serve ourselves we can serve our humanity only if we serve ourselves by being strong having confidence in our forces we are able to think to trans transfer knowledge and knowledge is also science i give the example of medicinal plants when these plants are used it's belongs to our culture but it becomes it is patented and it becomes science and even in our field men take it back and women my body is mine is like it relates to prostitution you possess your body and you have to abide by rules imposed upon the body of women this function we have to discuss this function the population if you look at what happened in buffalo everybody talked about the great replacement that means that black people arrived some are more black yellow but no green but this big replacement it is a replacement feared by the western world that's why europe wants to be closed mainly now the africans accuse the western world you talk about uh big replacement you are afraid you don't use resources and if you leave more resources for the others the planet is more habitable and they improve the idea that africa is full of resources that's true but africa is poor africa has a lot of resources which you can find nowhere else very precious wood in niger uranium and this is one of the poorest countries in the world when you come in and you say that this big replacement is going to create it and when i say the women do it i say my uterus is the reason for this a big replacement only used one word deuteros this is a important issue if we don't decide upon the use of our body how and when i want with whom i want then it is going to be we will remain victim and it's very important issue we have to raise it it is not raised in our space and universities we talk about care the african people have a tendency to idolize the woman like the christians the holy virgin the mother of god what does it mean and it's also very costly because it means you are only the mother and questions and these issues we raise it because it is related to care we are trapped because we have to represent this side of the african culture have done it it is part of my social contract but a lot of women have this social contract which are interrelated at this level of the recognition of the reproduction of knowledge i don't like this word indigenous knowledge but it is not only knowledge it is science and at this level we have to fight to remain at this we support ourselves at this higher level which is academia where it's very difficult to interact and the other space are these basis of human life christine can i can i come in um i want to tie some things together that my sisters here have said and to start with issues of ethics and being human but before that uh when using i was talking about the women's archive uh in in my in her introduction of me christine mentioned a film that colleagues and i have worked on and and you know building this archive and we've been interviewing women activists who came of age in the 70s so most of these women are now in their 70s one is 80 the youngest just turned 60. and though and the film is called when women speak i mean that should be self-explanatory now uh my one of my daughters is a member of the team and she has been extremely irritated because every time we have shown the film one of the first people to raise their hands to ask a question will be a man in the room and nine times out of ten there will be a question about where are the fathers what about the husbands and the brothers and she's like the film is called when women speak and so even in this space about women it's like guys can you you read what this film is about anyway that was just an anecdote uh so think about care and um you know ethics and being human i know we all like the the notion of ubuntu and um in in our khan culture we have there's a saying ben kum jai nifa mi fan sujari bin kum so the left hand washes the white the right and the right hand washes the left and it is to underscore uh reciprocal relationships and so for example if somebody who is materially better off than somebody else receives a gift from the person who is materially not as prosperous you the one who are materially better off cannot say oh it's okay you shouldn't have because when you do that you express a certain arrogance that you will never need their help and we also say times change you do not know what your condition will be tomorrow and so to look at the material whether it's you know the wealth that you have whether it's the knowledge that you have whether you're a professor in an institution you don't know where you're going to be tomorrow and i think in the ethics of care um in the feminist movement we have we've done a good job of that but we also need to recognize the ways in which i think in today's world there's there's a tendency for us to weaponize our knowledge if that makes sense so you know i know better than you and i know more than this other person and the academy is very good at making us those kinds of people because we need to get our promotion and we want to be the most popular professor in the room and the one who is cited and gets the most hits in social media and so there's a lot of shouting and and and and the louder that you can shout and and the more elegant your shouting can be your your knowledge is privileged and um you know as my sisters have said there's there's a whole lot of knowledge out there that we don't know about the internet has made it possible for us to harvest a lot more but look at that library you talk about until you make it accessible for us we all know what's in there and then you know to today to talk about women from niger without you know making reference to uh to that knowledge we we need to be very careful and i i make this point in relation to care because we the academy and these spaces of knowledge production are very fraught they can be very exhausting that work is being done on women's bodies a lot of the time we need to be careful to support each other so that we are not you know putting more onto these bodies that are so fractured covet came and this we all know the damage that it's done um to all of us as human beings but especially to women who are born the brunt of more of this reproductive work who have experienced higher levels of domestic and other forms of violence during lockdowns who have in ghana for example when we closed the borders they were close to everyone when we opened the borders we opened the international borders so the aeroplanes could come in but our road borders to togo to benin and niger and nigeria and codevoir were still closed who's carrying the the goods to trade that we are going to eat the tomatoes from burkina faso is the women who are bringing them to ghana so when you close the land borders not only are you depriving women of their livelihoods you are depriving us of our tomato stew that we have to eat in ghana and you're making it more expensive for women to produce that tomato stew because even though they may be getting quote unquote housekeeping money from their husbands that money is not going to increase and we all know that that money is a small portion of what the woman puts on the table now she has to find more money to buy those same tomatoes at a higher price so we're not thinking in policy terms you know about this this kind of care in ghana we've now introduced what is called an e-levy and that e-levy is adding a tax of 1.5 percent on all electronic uh transactions what this may mean this is early days yet it started on the 1st of may we don't know people have said they are not going to do it they are going to move back to cash if women decide that as traders they have to they are going to move back to cash and they are doing these long distances the armed robbers on the roads are going to come and attack those buses which was in decline because people are doing electronic transfers and women are going to be under attack there's going to be more you know robbery there will be more of these rapes on the road and so on so i mean we we we have a lot of these conversation um you know often yes as feminists will introduce it to the space but we want to [Music] conscientize and evangelize everybody when you're having these conversations put it on the table because you know it affects all of us one of the women in the film who's a lawyer the film that i talked about she says laws are supposed to be general neutral but they have invariably not been favorable to women and so we you know in terms of care to really interrogate that and um the la the last uh two things that i want to say is in practicalizing the spaces that we inhabit and perhaps women absolutely have to take the lead in this when i was a young scholar i'm going to talk about two examples that i experienced one i went to a conference in the somewhere in nairobi it was basically a women's feminist conference and the organizers made arrangements for child care i took my two-year-old then two-year-old daughter along during the day she had child care during the the evenings you know i took care of her and then i was one of the first fellows at the african gender institute when that was instituted it changed over the years but the year that i went the two of us who went with young children the children were provided they went to school during the day and then we were given a student to assist us over the weekends in case we wanted to work i decided that you know the children and myself and this young student we would go shopping and sightseeing but you know this was built into the program to recognize that this is the kind of work that women do i mean either we would have left our children be at home and not gone for the program and you know what does that mean uh for our careers and and you know it's it's the neoliberal there are all these concepts that we throw out there we live with them that neoliberal corporatizing [Music] higher education space is cutting more and more of these things off women have lamented for years who are doing the reproductive work how can you have a faculty meeting at 4 00 pm that will close at 7 00 pm and at the same time you're expected to be at home why are you a bad mother you didn't pick your children or what is your husband going to eat and all of that kind of thing and yet they the academy space has not changed very much but you know we're still asking for these things in places where there are gender centers some of these policies have changed and fortunately or unfortunately we still need to be the ones doing that kind of care work i know you wanted to you know to also talk about it's it's like race work race women are doing a lot of that care if you're in the diaspora you are the only black person in the faculty you know the black students are going to come to you yeah and it's it's it's a lot of work but it is also a privilege and and as much as we we get tired of um you know being the ones to do that kind of work i think we are not yet in the moment where we can say you know what but it means also regenerating ourselves in the younger generation and creating those spaces for them so that they they can continue that care work and do it with with grace i mean we are so all exhausted in our souls and in our spirits with you know the bombardment of the climate the extractive industries the um the kinds of things that are being done we can talk about policy changes in the us and and women's bodies and what we're exhausted and we're often very much in pain and it means recognizing each other's pain and the places that we are hurting um i think that it's it was bell hooks who said something about you know we have to mourn together we have to recognize our communal pain mourn together um he work together towards healing and and extend grace towards each other because we're going to make mistakes we're going to step on tools we're going to sometimes be hurtful but we we should be the ones we shouldn't be the ones to reinforce that we should be the ones to hold each other and to you know to lift each other up so that we can look at the next generation you know and be proud i can see my student now heading a center that i was the first director of i don't know 20 years ago and she's doing a more amazing job than myself and my successes and then you're like wow you planted a seed and so um i see that as important um in in the care work that we should be doing [Applause] coming after all this so i will go back to the question of ethical demand i think it's very important the question of naming also and naming effectively those before but naming also among ourselves because we know the politic of situation is extremely important and the fact that so how we pay attention when we write uh to effectively make reference even to people who are not non you know so we don't align you know like list all the absolutely men and so then it legitimate us but so if we of course make reference to less non-people is as if we are not you know so how to make that absolutely a constant constant new principle yes i will make reference so that's you know i think it's really fundamental so it's naming effectively those who have been you know made invisible but also naming ourselves you know and as we were saying also talking about the you know the french speaking versus english speaking so therefore for instance in the english speaking suddenly you know there will be a discovery of something which has been like 15 years ago already being you know studied and written on in french if if we just take these two languages you know okay so an effective academy is totally patriarchal and hierarchical and sexist and and even more so with effectively the privatization of of university and we do know but i want just for me to go back to what you say how to generate mode of care and hope you know in learning and teaching and so what is learning and what is teaching right or what do we teach and how do we teach and how do we effectively made it's okay not to know it's okay you don't have to prove that you can quote with that no it's okay even it's better if you arrive but not knowing and by being ready to unlearn what you learned because this is also the you know like remember finance say that you know the best way that for colonial is to make the oppressed becoming the agent of their own oppression so we arrive at the university we come from school we come from the society and we are full of you know like wrong things so how do we accept and learn so that we can learn right and so we say uh okay it's okay no you don't need to prove to me just you know be sincere i think really and so how do we free ourselves of our own it's not just outside there you know but our own things and just a little episode you know i'm i'm totally fascinated by you know tech start and weaving and in a summer school in thailand uh we had to choose what we wanted to do for the wood carving silver carving or weaving anyway so i pick up weaving and i went with the student so the student learned to leave and there was also for us i was with a friend of mine two faculty we also could learn weaving so i was given to the master with i mean the master was going to teach me and i started and i could not understand anything i mean the thread was working and so on and she did not speak english or die whatever and so she was slapping my hand like that like stupid girl you know don't you don't get worse you know i i didn't get it right so she was like and so um of course i become humiliated so i say no i don't need to learn you know it's okay i don't need to learn and i went and then i said and i said to myself you're right about de colonial and so on and here you are parting like a little girl just because you can't you know learn something so i came back and she looked at me and she said okay so i'm a little like that you know but my point is when i stop to calculate what she was doing when i stopped to put my intellect and say okay now she put her finger here now i should put it in here and i trust my finger and i look at the way she was dancing and i practically closed my eyes you know so to stop too effectively i got it i was so proud my point is like senses also should be brought back in teaching and learning because otherwise it's just about reading the book you know so that the the absolute you know like and reading the text and so on so there is no more uh there is i mean the body are constricted right we learn to sit quietly thank you very much you know and and listen to people for hours and of course as soon as you move like that the teachers say what's going what's we learned that since we enter you know what a you know like little school so with with we there is a connection between made between learning and your body being like like that right no noise you know and whatever so how do we want to do the senses in the classroom and in teaching because if we talk about hope hope is not just about reading the text oh my god this is possible this is possible i can contest that right this is possible so hope is a possibility right that yes it is possible one day one day we will be free right and this is that so one day and so this is really a bring back also for me generating you know it's like bringing back desire and joy please you know that's sometimes it's like so serious you know it's like oh my god you know like like a place you know like a calm down you know i know we are just learning and what do we learn we learn to be free we are learning we had to be learning courage we have the students have to leave their classroom full of strengths and courage for themselves for themselves you know so they have to know that yes you can change the world trust yourself you can change it the world is not another the social world is not the earth around the moon or the moon around the person you know or around the sun it's socially made so we can undo it the room we are in was you know conceived by an architect and built by people whom we don't even know you know workers and it's clean every morning by a woman woman you know we don't even know her name and we enter that space as if this is what's natural that was meant for us to effectively have this conversation but how do we reintegrate effectively that space in in its you know history and materiality in the way we are talking and teaching so you know how effectively we we bring in that in teaching how teaching is weaving you know we could say and learning and and effectively we have to to learn and we have to make uh so people read not only uh when we say philosophy it's not it's also all quote unquote i don't like or whatever but we don't know what to say but effectively the fact that everyone in every culture has thought about the world of course about what is birth what is death what is life what is good living and that is philosophy exactly and so how do we think that and how for instance a very important uh notion like freedom and liberty was effectively first conceived by the people who fought against you know slavery slave trade and colonialism even if they did not write if this woman did not write books yes they can they have a theory of freedom and that theory of freedom is extremely important so for me it's also how do you bring back this kind of theory in the classroom and you don't make you know hierarchy about what has been written and is you know the great library of great men but also effectively how for instance woman you know that i wrote a lot about who cleans the world you know with taking care from the cleaning not just the nurse whatever but all the woman but the cleaning because as i said of any society will not function without this daily every morning cleaning we will not enter hospital classroom restaurant university shops whatever without these cleaning things so how do we take that cleaning as effectively as a other theory not just it should be better they should be paid better that's that's the minimum right that's justice but effectively how do we integrate this as a political question so we can imagine the world that it will we're cleaning will be effective something that we need that any society need but it will not effectively put on the back of black and and and a woman and then so sometimes once in a while we say oh you did an essential work you know like you didn't depend on me and we upload them right and then the following day it's it's like that so how do we we introduce that my point is like how do we teach that the world around is absolutely incredibly cruel and brutal and full of hope and full of hope that every morning everywhere in the world people are standing up and fighting this has never stopped so how do we say yes you know because the system constructs a powerlessness yeah feeling that what can you do it's too much where do you start it's too much i mean i'm reading the news where i was like oh my god i go home you know and i don't know but so how do we effectively hope is reintroducing the classroom every day you know and as you were saying also the question of mental suffering how this is incredible produce you know like incredibly produce so many people are not doing well yeah it was reinforced by the pandemic but also because the life is miserable you know it's like it's not you know like what are we offered consumption well you know after buying your third bag you know it's like not fill your life really right exactly so i will say love you know is part of the care politics of care loving each other and effectively you know building collectives never being alone absolutely never isolation is the killer and the system produced that because it produces a competition among us as you were saying right you know that of course you know that these things so how do we effectively have also the incredible you know solidarity always and then we don't make judgment for me for instance the family struggle is like you know cleaning women ma you know striking they don't need to have a theory about the kurunyan whatever what they are doing is decoding our struggle an absolutely fundamental declinal struggle so love joy desire and hope absolutely [Applause] my dears i don't know about you but we just had a master class right we have just had uncovered before us live in living color the nuances of how we can go about doing the colonial scholarship and developing the colonial visions and of course community nobody has to do this alone this is just the beginning it is 12 we have to work in a time conscious fashion right we also have to look after our bodily needs and there are things also coming up for us for the rest of the day i'm not going to say goodbye i'm going to say thank you i'm going to say this is a moment of gratitude this is a moment of the beginnings and the fact that we can build visions before i get all emotional and embarrass myself i'm just going to say one more time can i please hear it for the african feminists in the house in the house thank you thank you thank you thank you now my sisters my mothers i would say we have a little something for you so that you can remember today carry it with you as well uh we have our young team bringing up a few uh well a little bit of freshness and a little bit of beauty for you wow [Laughter] thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you [Applause] there is beauty and knowledge no it's fantastic it says care may i also please extend my sincere gratitude to my team i want to thank miss leanne rizotsky lisa nagel miss stephanie yasser and we also have a couple of more young ladies yes there we are we've got miss linda bessie giroua and miss marisso all of them part of the team who made this possible and of course of course we could not have done this we could not have done this without all of you thank you for being here for bringing good things for bringing good wives and also to for getting good things i hope so in the spirit of hope in the spirit of the colonial love and in the spirit of a community please let us carry on into the world and please continue those conversations thank you so much thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and i would like to say to rudiger measurements concentrate university when i go to the university pictures in black and white but i have some 20 years ago in black i'm with my twin sister i can't say who is who i just see the eyes shining and the rest is black but in that time we made progress thank you i didn't need it you