A Position Paper from Liberation Alliance Africa’s Community of Practice
Authors; Mubeezi Tenda, Omolara Oriye, Oluwatobiloba Ayodele
For many of us, the first gong that summoned us to the feminist frontlines of organising was the one inviting us to respond to a violence forged in the kiln of patriarchy. This violence, hot and red, had our name, race, class and sex, embossed on it, undoubtedly fashioned to be experienced by our bodies or the bodies of those like us. The stirring of feminist consciousness within our souls, whether in childhood or adulthood, was set in motion by shrill cries, muffled sobs, pregnant silences of the women, the girls, the femmes, the wretched on the periphery.
Our experience of violence, our witnessing of it, the expectation and dread of it dredged up a collective fear, collective rage, and collective longing to be free of it. Our attunement to this violence has been the psychological assembly ground upon which our feminist comrades’ bonds have been forged. The remnant of those bonds is a women’s and feminist movement that has its finger on the pulse of the issue, at least for the most part. This beloved and indefatigable movement has theorised around violence in its gendered ways and put up a laudable and sustained effort at the household, communal, and regional levels to address it.
To contribute to and advance the movement’s work on preventing and responding to sexual violence, we believe that this moment calls for a pause and a collective audit. Addressing sexual violence requires examining the forces shaping the current ecosystem of violence. What new or enduring dynamics are at play? How effective are the tools we currently rely on? What knowledge do we hold, and what knowledge has been overlooked?
This need for reflection prompted a convening of Liberation Alliance Africa’s Community of Practice for an enquiry into the ecosystem of sexual violence. Our enquiry focused on three critical areas.
The first was an examination of the political economy of sexual violence prevention and response in Africa. We interrogate the ways in which the lingering colonial architecture continues to shape interventions, often moulding them to serve the interests of global powers and the hierarchies they seek to maintain. Our reflections also extended to the language surrounding sexual violence, which plays a powerful role in determining what forms of violence become visible, and which blind spots persist. In many cases, this language renders certain forms of violence, as well as specific categories of victims and perpetrators, invisible.
Our second area of enquiry focuses on colonialism, the colonial-patriarchal state, and the neo-colonial state’s complicity in sexual and gender-based violence. We trace how colonial puritanism demonised African sexualities and bodies, imposing moral codes that continue to shape contemporary governance. We also examine how the neo-colonial state continues to reproduce these logics, often times deploying sexual violence as a tool of control and domination.
Our final enquiry centres on epistemic sovereignty and truth-telling as necessary foundations for meaningful prevention and response. We explore how reclaiming African feminist thought, indigenous knowledge systems, and movement-led analysis is essential for transforming how sexual violence is understood and addressed.
These reflections culminated in a position paper we are pleased to share, titled Recentering African Indigenous Knowledge to Prevent and Respond to Sexual Violence.
This paper is, in many ways, an attempt to leap off the dizzying merry-go-round that donor-driven agendas and programming have sent us into cycles of solutions that circle the surface of the problem without grasping its taproot.
From Liberation Alliance Africa’s Community of Practice to the movement, we share this enquiry into the sexual violence ecosystem and invite you to engage deeply with its questions, insights, and gaps, until together we arrive at pathways capable of ridding our societies of sexual violence.
Read the Position Paper on this link: Recentering African Indigenous Knowledge to Prevent and Respond to Sexual Violence.
