by Sionne Neely “We’ve said it before: We don’t like prisons, but we are not afraid of them. There are thousands of innocent people who belong under the sun, not in prison cells, but we will continue with our attempts under any and all circumstances.” ~ Mahienour Elmasry To women rights defenders Yara Sallam, Sanaa […]
By Doaa Abdelaal 9th November, 2014 Life is so strange most of the time. It is the 9th of November again… for those who can remember, it was on this same 9th day of November, at night, when the Berlin wall started falling. I was 13 years then, watching it on the screen of our […]
by Fatma Emam In my country, we are witnessing the backlash of an incomplete revolution. We are suffering at the hands of a military junta and the Islamists who stole our dreams. In spite of this, we go on in the heat of solidarity and the power of our passion. I want to confess […]
by Olutimehin Adegbeye “There’s really no such thing as ‘the voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” - Arundhati Roy In three years’ time, my daughter will be five years old. She will have started school, learnt to read and ride a bicycle, decided that boys are nasty and mastered the […]
Monday, 17th November 2014 Cambridge You were there in Kampala Dear Yara My name is Njoki Wamai, an African feminist from Kenya and a scholar activist who is currently a student at the University of Cambridge. I first heard about you in Kampala at the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) sponsored non-fiction writer’s workshop which […]
by Jessica Horn I Mtu ni watu. A person is people. Or maybe a person is not a person without other people. By defending other people you become a person. But what if that person is a woman who speaks luminous truths to dictatorial power? What if she is a woman that breathes the words […]
July 16, 2014 Dear habibty Yara, It’s Nelly Bassily here. Yara, first, I’m sending you lots and lots of solidarity and love from Canada! Habibty, you have to be one of the strongest and most amazing young feminists I have the pleasure and honour to call a friend in Egypt. When I first saw […]
Messages, Poems & Prayers of Solidarity with Women Human Rights Defenders, from Southern African feminists and activists Just Associates Southern Africa (JASS SNA) & friends of JASS came together to express our solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Egypt as well as women human rights defenders standing for rights across the African continent and […]
by Hope Chigudu As we think about our sisters; women rights activists; Yara Sallam and Sanaa Seif as well as 21 others, unjustly imprisoned in Egypt, and other women human rights defenders from across the continent, not forgetting our little ones captured by Boko Haram, and those battling merciless Ebola, we pause to gather our […]
This year, in recognition of 16 Days of Activism, the African Feminist Forum will be sharing a series of opinion pieces, letters, poems, prayers, and words of solidarity to our sisters struggling daily to defend the rights of African women. Over the next 16 days we will feature contributions from African feminists from across the […]