What does it mean to be a feminist today in Africa? Senegalese scholar and writer Rama Salla Dieng tries to answer the question in the collection of interviews African feminists. A decolonial history (African presence, 2021). His compatriot Mame-Fatou Ndiang, director of the documentaryBlack Mariannethe Egyptian human rights activist Yara Sallam, Amal Bint Nadia, moderator of the #EnaZeda movement (Me Too Tunisian), or the Ghanaian Nana Darkoa, co-founder of the blog on sexuality « Adventures from the bedrooms of African women » expose their commitments and confide in their constant struggles.
It took several round trips to definitely set an appointment with Rama Salla Dieng, herself an activist. Setbacks which illustrate, according to this lecturer in international development and African studies at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), the mental burden which weighs more and more heavily on women since the arrival of Covid-19.
Jeune Afrique: Can we estimate the date of the emergence of feminism in Africa?
Rama Salla Dieng : African feminisms are as old as the continent itself, they existed even before the appearance of this term. There have always been women and men who wanted to move the lines, to work for women’s rights. The first university in the world, for example, was created by an African woman, the Moroccan Fatima al-Fihriya.
But often the focus has been on elite personalities who had the ability to make their voices heard, and this other form of domination was at the expense of other women, who were not from noble rank, who were sometimes uneducated.
You emphasize the need to historicize African feminist movements. Is it this need that motivated your approach?
The objective was to reach out to African feminists and let them themselves create a feminist historiography of the continent and its diaspora. It’s not that women’s voices didn’t exist until now, it’s that they’ve been silenced by a way of telling the story that deliberately put men’s voices in the forefront – simply because that most historians were men.
