In Decolonization and Afro-Feminism, Sylvia Tamale presents a powerful and urgent call for Africa’s intellectual, cultural, and political liberation through an Afro-feminist lens. The book critically examines how colonialism has deeply entrenched systems of oppression—based on race, gender, sexuality, class, and knowledge production—and argues that true decolonization requires more than political independence; it demands a radical rethinking of African identities, histories, and futures.
Tamale challenges Eurocentric and patriarchal frameworks that continue to dominate African societies, institutions, and academia. She explores themes such as:
The coloniality of gender and sexuality, using case studies like Caster Semenya to expose how Western norms pathologize African bodies.
The importance of intersectionality in understanding overlapping systems of oppression.
The role of Afro-ecofeminism in reconnecting African ecological wisdom with social justice.
The need to decolonize African academia, law, and family structures to recenter Indigenous knowledge and epistemologies.
The potential of Ubuntu as a framework for justice, community, and relationality.
The book is both a scholarly critique and a visionary roadmap, emphasizing that decolonization must be a feminist, inclusive, and holistic project—one that reclaims Africa’s dignity, autonomy, and intellectual sovereignty.
Written with clarity and passion, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism is essential reading for students, activists, scholars, and anyone committed to understanding and advancing Africa’s liberation in the 21st century.
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Professor Sylvia Tamale is a leading African feminist, multidisciplinary scholar and Coordinator of the Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Centre based at the School of Law, Makerere University in Uganda. Prof Tamale was the first female Dean of Law in…
Why do so many Africans believe they cannot break the “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” cycle? Six decades after colonial flags were lowered and African countries gained formal independence, the continent struggles to free itself from the deep legacies of colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy. Many intellectuals, politicians, feminists and other activists, eager to contribute to Africa’s liberation, have frustratingly felt like they took the wrong path. Analyzed through the eyes of Afro-Feminism, this book revisits some of the fundamental preconditions needed for radical transformation. It challenges the traditional human rights paradigm and its concomitant idea of “gender equality,” flagging instead, the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a serious alternative for reinvigorating African notions of social justice. If you are a student of Africa or in a space where you wish to recalibrate your compass and reboot your consciousness in the struggle for Africa’s liberation, this book is for you.
Why do so many Africans believe they cannot break the “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” cycle? Six decades after colonial flags were lowered and African countries gained formal independence, the continent struggles to free itself from the deep legacies of colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy. Many intellectuals, politicians, feminists and other activists, eager to contribute to Africa’s liberation, have frustratingly felt like they took the wrong path. Analyzed through the eyes of Afro-Feminism, this book revisits some of the fundamental preconditions needed for radical transformation. It challenges the traditional human rights paradigm and its concomitant idea of “gender equality,” flagging instead, the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a serious alternative for reinvigorating African notions of social justice. If you are a student of Africa or in a space where you wish to recalibrate your compass and reboot your consciousness in the struggle for Africa’s liberation, this book is for you.
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The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher is a riveting account of the bumpy first decade of the work life of Karim F Hirji, a retired Professor of Medical Statistics. Filled with a distinctive variety of eye-opening episodes, it covers lecturing at the University of Dar es Salaam, the life of a political exile in a remote rural area and the challenges of setting up from scratch a one-of-a-kind educational institute in Africa. With a style that seamlessly combines the personal with the general, Hirji provides an illuminating description of different aspects of the Tanzanian political, educational, economic and rural landscape during the 1970s. Starting with a commentary on teacher training, he concludes with a critical comparison of modern university education in the nation with that of the earlier era.
Ce livre est un apport précieux pour demander à changer de focale et de perspective au sujet des migrations à l’intérieur du continent africain. Celles-ci sont bien plus importantes quan- titativement, mais aussi économiquement et historiquement, que les migrations de l’Afrique vers l’Europe. Elles sont beaucoup plus silencieuses et infiniment moins étudiées que celles du Sud vers le Nord. Ces migrations sont vitales, tant pour les pays de départ que pour ceux d’arrivée. Ainsi, des millions de jeunes partent chaque année pour les pays de la côte, et cela sans susciter les mêmes résistances, fantasmes et peurs qu’en Europe.
Cet ouvrage a le grand mérite d’intégrer les migrations dans la perspective plus large des mobilités, puis d’en examiner les liens avec le développement. Il est rédigé par de jeunes chercheurs africains, qui produisent à partir de leurs terrains spécifiques des analyses à valeur générale sur les sociétés contemporaines. Ils contribuent ainsi au renouvellement des sciences sociales à partir des pays africains.
On peut en revanche souligner que l’ouvrage a relevé un défi important : celui d’éclairer à la fois les dynamiques de l’expérience migratoire, des trajectoires suivies par les migrants et des espaces migratoires à l’intérieur de l’Afrique. — Sylvie Ayimpam, « Mobilités, circulations et frontières. Migrations, mobilités et développement en Afrique », Anthropologie & développement [En ligne], 51 | 2020, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2020, consulté le 23 février 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/anthropodev/1068 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/anthropodev.1068
These companion volumes are refreshing because they introduce us to many less well- known instances which amply illustrate just how mobile African populations really are at the regional, intra-regional and global scales. – Paul NUGENT, University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom)
Un ouvrage d’une grande actualité qui aborde la question des migrations sous un angle radicalement nouveau et original : l’articulation dynamique entre la migration, la mobilité et le développement en Afrique de l’Ouest. Ces deux volumes bilingues renouvellent le débat sur les migrations : de quoi faire réfléchir ensemble l’Afrique et l’Europe. – Marie-Caroline SAGLIO-YATZIMIRSKY, INALCO, CESSMA Paris (France)
Christian Bouquet, « Quelques éclairages nouveaux sur les migrations africaines », EspacesTemps.net [En ligne], Books, 2020 | Mis en ligne le 20 November 2020, consulté le 20.11.2020. URL : https://www.espacestemps.net/en/articles/quelques-eclairages-nouveaux-sur-les-migrations-africaines/ ; DOI : 10.26151/esapcestemps.net-jc2a-6b03
Avec la participation de Naluwembe BINAISSA, Alimou DIALLO, Nyalo Barkissa DRABO, Sylvester KOHOL, A. Aziz MOSSI, Loppa NGASSOU, Lawrence Rafaih OKELLO, Mutiat Titilope OLADEJO, Zakaria SORÉ, Astadjam YAOUBA et Irissa ZIDNABA.
Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth is about how new generations are discovering their mission of humanizing the world by claiming Fanon as a thinker for our times. Why Fanon, why now? For the wretched of the earth, conditions have not improved since Fanon’s time and in some cases they have worsened. Reason and revolt are inescapable, quite simply because, as Fanon wrote, it has become ‘impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word’. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Fanon’s death (in 1961), the contributors to this book address the resonances of Fanon’s thinking on movements of resistance and mass revolutionary uprisings occurring in response to repression or state violence in Algeria, Brazil, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Pakistan, Palestine, Portugal, South Africa, Syria, Trinidad, USA and beyond. The driving force of each chapter of this unique collection of writings is Fanonian praxis, engaging with Fanon the thinker and Fanon the revolutionary.
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It is important to see both Marx’s brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.
It is clear today that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.
Kitabu hiki kinaturudisha katika kipindi cha kusisimuwa cha miaka ya vita baridi, kipindi ambacho, sambamba na kipindi cha leo, madola ya kibeberu yamekuwa yakifanya njama za kubadilisha serikali zilizokuwepo na kuziweka madarakani zile zenye kufuata amri. Kwa kutumia kumbukumbu za picha za Johari, nyaraka za siri za Marekani na Uingereza, pamoja na mahojiano ya kina, kitabu kinatowa uchambuzi juu ya nafasi na satwa ya Chama cha Umma Party nchini Zanzibar na kiongozi wake mwenye upeo mkubwa wa mambo, Mwanamapinduzi mfuasi wa Itikadi ya Karl Marx, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu. Kwa kuangalia kwa njia ya uwiano wa mifano inayokwenda sambamba ya wahka wa Marekani kuhusu Uchina ya Kikomunisti katika miaka ya 1960 na woga walionao hivi sasa kuhusu ushawishi wa Uchina, kitabu kinatafakari juu ya mivutano mipya iliyopo katika kupigania rasilmali za Afrika, kuundwa kwa kikosi cha AFRICOM, na jinsi Wanasiasa wa Afrika Mashariki wanavyoshiriki katika kuimarisha udhibiti wa Marekani katika nchi zao, na “Vita dhidi ya Ugaidi” katika ukanda wa Afrika Mashariki hivi sasa.
Now available from Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania: http://www.mkukinanyota.com
As the oldest (and arguably best-known) university in Uganda and the wider eastern and central Africa region, Makerere University looms large in the history of higher education on the continent. Alma mater to presidents, public intellectuals and pundits of all disciplines, Makerere has attracted considerable scholarly and popular attention, both in respect of its prominence and achievements, and well as with regard to its failures and foibles. The proposed book focuses on a particularly understudied aspect of the place of higher education in the African context, i.e. the relationship between a public university of unique historical importance and the contestations over democratization that have taken place both within campus and outside of it. It is built around the late-1980s struggle by the Makerere University Academic Staff Association (MUASA) for improved living conditions against the backdrop of the early programs of structural adjustment and economic reform that the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) government adopted soon after taking power in 1986. Although seemingly introverted in focus, in many respects the MUASA action represented the earliest forms of political struggle against a regime of governance that promised a great deal, but disappointingly delivered considerably less.
The focus on MUASA provides a critical entry-point to a wider debate about the place of organized democratic action by academics in a post-conflict context where the traditional institutions of political and civil society, i.e. political parties and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have either been severely compromised or discredited, or where they are too weak and inorganic to provide any form of significant counter-juxtaposition to the government in power. By organizing the first strike by academic staff in the sixty-seven (67) year history of the university, for a time MUASA became the focal-point for democratic organizing against a regime that was yet to fully expose its nefarious and anti-democratic colours. The book examines the broader issues concerning the relationship between organized academic action and democratization; the place of the Media in reviewing these struggles; the position of students as a critical component of academe; “big P” and “small p” politics affecting female academics, and finally, the paradoxical role of the School of Law in both aiding and inhibiting the struggle against dictatorship in a country which has enjoyed
This is a collection of observations and meditations by Professor Emeritus (York University, Toronto) and philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu on events, issues, people and ideas culled from recent history and the world, from the US and Canada to Ghana. If there is a persistent thread in these entries, it is this: Virtually all of them testify to the ironic truth of the saying that there is no place like home, no place, that is to say, which looks like the lodestar called home or comes close to approximating its promise of being a just space of human flourishing. Most of the entries are, therefore, harsh, particularly those on the USA. That is because that nation, in his view, has, in recent history, made a major contribution to rendering the world and every homestead we inhabit unhomely and sabotaging attempts to better it. But no one or place is spared, certainly not the author’s native land, Ghana. Canada appears intermittently in these pages in rather fragmentary and contrastive observations. That paucity of comments may be taken to be the complement the author pays to Canada as a place of relative civility and glimmers of decency in a mad and cruel world. It is a short work of predominantly gloomy pictures. But there are a few countervailing images and invocations of hope here and there. There are 166 entries of unequal lengths arranged around 14 headings. These epigrams are contrapuntal variations on the philosopher’s searing imprecation and visionary invocation: unfinished ode, resounding with intermittent fury, to the dawn of human existence set free from all tyrannizing enclosures.
The industrial food system is a major driver of climate change. Food sovereignty is critical to any lasting and just solution. The Great Climate Robbery shows readers how the industrial food system causes climate change, how food and agribusiness corporations are getting away with it and what can be done to turn things around.
Alexandra Walker
Delinked:
A Review of Sylvia Tamale’s Decolonization and Afro-Feminism
By Alexandra Walker (Howard University C’27) as part of the Black Feminist Theory taught in Howard University’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
Decolonization and Afro-Feminism by Sylvia Tamale is an intricate work that weaves together the intersectional relationship between racialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and gender roles within an African context to center decolonization as integral to the advancement of Afro-feminism. Professor Sylvia Tamale is a feminist, a legal scholar, and human rights practitioner whose fearlessness in speaking truth to power led her to serve as the first woman Dean of Makerere University School of Law. Fittingly, Tamale critically examines the historical, cultural, and socio-political dimensions of decolonization and its implications for the advancement of Afro-feminist thought.
Tamale begins by setting a historical backdrop for the work, because a clear understanding of the past enables one to walk with discernment in the present. In chapter one, Tamale explains that decolonization cannot be a one-time moment or thing. Decolonization and decolonial effects have historically been “Band-Aids” from people picking at the scabs that colonialism left on the continent. Tamale suggests that there needs to be more than a “Band-Aid” effort to fix the deep scars that have been left so to completely understand the complex damages left by colonization. The reversal of colonial legacies may take centuries and require unique and creative approaches.
Tamale’s notion of decolonization is multifaceted. Africans must think beyond “de-construction” of colonial structures and systems. Without a clear plan to rebuild and reconstruct there is no reason to de-construct and Tamale suggests that this sends Africans back into the arms of the colonizers. Moreover, the African agenda for decolonization and decolonial thought and activism should include reconstructions that prioritize: a) reclaiming humanity, b) reasserting self-determination, c) restoring spirituality, d) rebuilding territorial and bodily integrity, and above all, Africanness and the celebration of womanness.
Tamale makes one thing very clear, the goal of African decolonization and the decolonial project is about one thing: the restoration of dignity to the African people. Tamale does this by analyzing decolonization through a feminist lens. She asserts that decolonization cannot only address political independence but they must all challenge patriarchal structures inherited from colonial rule. Tamale draws attention to the often-overlooked contributions of African women in the struggle for liberation and asserts the need for an inclusive decolonization that recognizes and values the agency of women.
Later, Tamale breaks down some of the methods Europeans and Asians used to colonize Africa. From political colonization to the insidious and dangerous methods of psychological colonization, Tamale suggests that these same tactics can be used in reverse to decolonize and deconstruct colonial structures in Africa. She continues to say that Africans’ sense of history needs to be “delinked ” from the empire in order to delve deeper into Africa’s past (beyond the period of colonialism). Colonial powers were able to maintain their grip, influence, and imperialism through laws, education, religion, and pop culture. Tamale shows that through these mechanisms of globalization, naturalization, and rationalization colonists have been able to blur Africa’s vision to anything “indigenous”, which she aptly identifies as internalized colonization. Moreover, internalized colonization is so entrenched in global structures that the path to decolonization seems difficult and tortuous.
The intersectionality of identities is a central theme in Tamale’s analysis. She contends that Afro-feminism must confront the interconnected systems of oppression based on race, gender, and class. Tamale states that it is impossible to analyze race without also analyzing gender. Tamale continues to explain that until there is a shift to an understanding where there does not have to be an other to understand self, colonial structures will remain in place.
Sylvia Tamale’s Decolonization and Afro-Feminism is a groundbreaking exploration of the intersections between decolonization and feminism in the African context. The work explores and challenges prevailing colonial political, economic, and social structures. Tamale advocates for a more inclusive understanding of colonial structures as this is the only way to decolonize and delink African thought from colonial teachings. Tamale emphasizes the agency of women, while calling for a radical approach that recognizes the complexity and interconnectedness of racial, gender, and other colonial structures. Tamale’s book outlines key strategies, plans, and goals for the decolonization movement and the quest for the restoration of African dignity.
Tamale presents the possibility for a more just future in her critique of the present and suggestions for a pragmatic step forward. Tamale challenges reluctant minds, affirms African feminism as distinct within the spectrum of the global feminism, and places herself within the ever-developing canon of pivotal Black feminist thought for the 21st century. It becomes evident why the Black Feminist Theory course at Howard University incorporates Tamale into the list of authors and the book as assigned reading. It leads us to ask ourselves, “How do we get the work in front of the individuals who need to review them most?” whether in Africa or in one region of the global African Diaspora.