The Goethe-Institut Johannesburg is currently hosting the House of African Feminisms / African Feminisms Gathering from 25 to 28 September 2025. I had been invited to the space, and after reflection, I wrote to withdraw and protest the very concept of the space. While this space should be one of solidarity and fearless feminist analysis, the position of the German government makes it profoundly unsafe.
Goethe-Institut advances German state priorities and agendas across culture, language and political life. To host the African Feminisms gathering at the time of genocide of Palestinians doesn’t provide an avenue of true transnational feminist solidarity as required in these times, given the German government and its institutions’ continued denial of a free Palestine.
On 22 September 2025, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul declared: “A Palestinian state is our goal. We support the two-state solution. There is no other way. This, however, must be achieved through negotiations … Recognition of Palestine will come more at the end of the process.” This statement follows the earlier assertion on 25 July 2025 that Germany “will not recognise Palestine as a state in the short term,” despite mounting international pressure. These positions make clear that Germany refuses, here and now, to recognise Palestinian sovereignty, and instead props up a permanent limbo that denies Palestinians their right to self-determination.
At the same time, Germany remains materially implicated in sustaining Israel’s war machine. Since October 2023, it has approved over €485 million worth of arms exports to Israel, including weapons systems, ammunition, and parts for armoured vehicles. This contradiction — withholding recognition while supplying arms — reveals the deep entanglement of German foreign policy with the political economy of occupation.
As an African feminist, I cannot ignore this political economy of war. Gaza and the West Bank are not only sites of military violence but of an extractive war economy where arms industries, surveillance firms, and foreign governments profit. Manufactured scarcity — of food, water, electricity, and medicine — is weaponised. Women, as caregivers, workers, and heads of households, are left to absorb the devastating social and bodily costs.
To silence feminist voices on these issues is to endorse a system that treats women’s lives as collateral damage.
African feminist long pro-Palestine stance
African feminism is inextricably linked to the anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles, and Palestine is no different. African countries have for decades recognized the state of Palestine and actively supported Palestinian freedom. Pan-African feminism has always been rooted in solidarity with colonized peoples of the world, not their oppressors.
As Nalafem Collective reminded us at the start of this genocide: “The racist dehumanisation of the Palestinian people has always been a means for the apartheid state of Israel to pursue its settler colonial project, and justify atrocities committed to that end.”
Youmna El-Sayed, the Gaza Strip correspondent for Gaza, says: “The occupation has tried to make us give up on our lands, but just like our grandparents 76 years ago, we will not surrender. Defending Palestine is about defending humanity. Silence is complicity in this genocide.” Each day of Palestinian survival is an act of resistance — and silence in the face of this is complicity.
Our struggles are connected. Feminist solidarities extend to Sudan, Somalia, Tigray, Western Sahara and the Democratic Republic of Congo — sites where global arms trades, authoritarian regimes, and extractive economies drive catastrophe.
African feminism is not neutral
In an attempt to understand the political process that informs this gathering, what seems absent are:
- Safety and uncensored speech. Instead, we face the constant risk of censorship when naming settler occupation, apartheid, or genocide.
- Recognition of African feminist political traditions. Instead, our voices are curated and sanitised for institutional comfort.
- Protection of autonomy and thought sovereignty. Instead, Western right-wing authoritarianism contaminates our spaces and polices our thinking.
- Genuine solidarity.
Instead, convenings proceed as though African feminism can be separated from anti-imperial resistance. The worst part is that this is happening on South African soil, where both feminist and anti-apartheid workers have for decades consistently confronted and organised against the Israeli occupation.
Moreover, it is only recently that Germany has recognized its orchestrated genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples of Namibia, the first genocide of the 20th century and its colonial crimes in Tanzania, but refuses to commit to legally binding reparations agreements.
African feminist anti-colonial efforts must not be usurped and reduced to ahistorical rights, representation, and resources catch words. Whose rights? Whose resources? Representation at what table? A colonial table where our silence is complicit in ongoing catastrophe? We, as African feminists can’t afford to be divorced from the global carnage that empires, German among them, are inflicting through imperial extraction and occupation. Imperial spaces will not save us. Ignoring Palestine is not a position that any gathering in the name of African feminism should be allowed. African feminism curated by extensions of imperial states is a danger to the progress that many across the continent, across generations, have fought for.
The consequences of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians will not remain in Palestine. African feminisms, therefore, can’t be housed under foreign policies of the German government that refuse accountability and action towards ending the current siege and efforts to exterminate the Palestinian people.
Some of us may withdraw in protest, while others may participate, carrying these contradictions. But I cannot be silent in the face of global and historical catastrophe. To host an African Feminisms Gathering under conditions where solidarity with Palestine — or with other African and Global South struggles — is curtailed is to betray the very spirit of African feminist resistance. African feminism is not neutral. It is not comfortable. It is rooted in struggle, and it should not be censored.
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko (DPhil) is a decolonial feminist, feminist and political economist, activist scholar, and international movement builder.
Thank you. So grateful for your moral clarity and ethical leadership.
A well-written and timely critique. I was also invited to the Germain ‘House of African Feminisms’ but declined the invitation. African’s feminists should be the curators of African feminism. Our movement cannot be appropriated as an adjunct to German foreign policy.
Amina Mama
Keep up the principles that guife you
Power and the miasma of fear can be stripped naked by exposing these hidden acts of complicity by the so-called powers that be. Refusing to be a part of this complicity by calling them out loudly adds considerably to the protest.