Over the past year, Liberation Alliance Africa has sustained the Building Knowledge Bridges Community of Practice on Recentering African Indigenous Epistemologies to Prevent and Respond to Sexual Violence. This Community of Practice is a collective of African feminist scholars, practitioners, organisers, artists, and movement builders committed to the dreaming and making of a world free from sexual violence through knowledge bridges.
Sexual violence continues to impact communities across the African continent, and class, ethnicity and religion play a critical role in making civilians in conflict-affected countries particularly more vulnerable. It disproportionately affects women and girls, and ethnic, gender and racialized minorities. Sexual violence is compounded by conflict, displacement, poverty, and gender inequality. It remains significantly under-reported due to stigma and under-prosecuted? Due to weak and corrupt justice systems. Sexual violence includes rape and sexual assault, sexual coercion and exploitation, including trafficking for sexual exploitation and conflict-related sexual violence such as using rape as a weapon of war. It affects people of any gender and age.
Our starting premise is simple: sexual violence on the continent cannot be understood, let alone addressed, through frameworks that treat colonialism as history rather than a structural force that continues to shape theory, practice, and response to sexual violence.
Coloniality was coined by Peruvian philosopher and sociologist Aníbal Quijano, and it describes the long-lasting pattern of power produced by colonial rule and shapes how we approach epistemological frameworks through which violence is understood. Epistemology deals with questions concerning the nature, scope, and sources of knowledge. A meaningful analysis of sexual violence must begin by seeking to decolonise knowledge and epistemic structures. This analysis requires us to interrogate the assumptions that underpin dominant theories, question whose expertise is legitimised, and create space for African feminist epistemologies to shape how violence is understood, prevented, and responded to.
We felt an urgent need to organise as scholars and practitioners to generate new frameworks grounded in our histories, political realities, and lived experiences. Our analyses are rooted in our confrontation of the neo-colonial state, the global imperialist, extractive and patriarchal systems that shape our everyday existence. We arrive as feminists in service of a liberatory project, convinced that knowledge-making is itself a site of feminist struggle.
As the CoP came together through both intentional convening and organic growth, we began organising our work around three enquiries that we believe are critical to envisioning a decolonial feminist approach to preventing and responding to sexual violence in Africa.
The first enquiry, Whose Knowledge? An Audit of the Current Knowledge Systems within Sexual Violence Prevention and Response in Africa examines the dominant literature, asks whose voices have shaped the field, whose knowledge has been marginalised, and what becomes possible when African feminist scholarship is placed at the centre of analysis.
The second enquiry, The Coloniality of Sexual Violence: Gender, Power, Sovereignty, and the Neo-Colonial State, advances interventions on sexual violence that explicitly interrogate the role and impact of hetero-patriarchal colonial racial-capitalism, alongside the complicity of neo-colonial states, in producing and sustaining conditions of gendered violence.
The third enquiry, Truth-telling and Epistemic Sovereignty in the Prevention and Response Continuum, centres on indigenous and endogenous knowledge systems as essential practice-based frameworks for reimagining prevention, response, healing, accountability, and collective safety.
The Imperative of Recentering African Epistemologies
At Liberation Alliance Africa, we believe African women and gender-expansive people’s knowledge-making and world-building are crucial to de-westernising normative assumptions and dominant approaches. African women and gender-expansive scholars must nurture new ways of knowing and being- knowledge that doesn’t just challenge dominant views, but creates a rich foundation for how we understand reality and tackle life’s critical questions.
For a long time, African women and gender minorities were treated as objects of study rather than producers of theory and knowledge. Researchers parachuted into our communities, using extractive methods to shape how the world views us and our very own worldview. Through the work of African feminist scholars, we have come to affirm that external validation, particularly dominant Western validation, was never the measure of legitimacy, and that African epistemologies should be at the centre of our intellectual labour.
Nigerian feminist scholar Prof. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s landmark 1997 book titled “The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses” offered a critique of gender as a Western category presenting pre-colonial Yorùbá society as an example because it was organized primarily around seniority and age rather than fixed gender hierarchies and presented an argument that colonialism didn’t strengthen an existing patriarchal system, but it imposed gender as a foundational category of social domination; Ugandan feminist legal scholar Prof. Sylvia Tamale‘s writings on decolonisation and sexuality in African Sexualities: A Reader (2011) and Decolonization and Afro-Feminism (2020) make arguments that African sexualities have been doubly distorted by colonial administrators and post-colonial governments as they continued to enforce a colonial moral code. Amina Mama’s writings such as her foundational text titled “Beyond the Masks Race, Gender and Subjectivity” on feminist psychology and postcolonial subjectivity noted how colonialism itself produced trauma and internalized racial hierarchies and a holistic liberatory process is required to address the psychological dimensions of coloniality and her essay “Sheroes and villains: conceptualizing colonial and contemporary violence against women in Africa“ sought to offer a different perspective on the historical trajectories of violence against women in Africa.
Awa Thiam, a prominent Senegalese feminist, argued in her landmark 1978 book La Parole aux négresses (Black Sisters, Speak Out) that polygamy is a severe form of structural and psychological violence rooted in patriarchy and the triple oppression of class, race, and gender. Sudanese Anthropologist Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf’s work is also heavily centered on the lived experiences of African women and how they inform issues such as gender, displacement, state violence and bodily autonomy in Sudan and the broader African diaspora. South African feminist scholar and writer Pumla Dineo Gqola examines in her foundational 2015 text Rape: A South African Nightmare how South Africa’s exceptionally high rates of sexual violence are not an isolated crime problem but are rooted in the country’s history of colonialism, apartheid, and patriarchy. Nigerian scholar Catherine Acholonu’s theory of Motherism: the Afrocentric Alternative to Feminism shifted the scholarship toward centring African women’s own epistemologies and lived experiences.
For us, this project is not simply about recovering forgotten histories or correcting the academic record. It is about expanding the possibilities of a liberatory future and carefully building these possibilities into institutions and frameworks that uphold these futures.
The Building Knowledge Bridges Community of Practice is an invitation to think with one another, to reclaim African feminist and Indigenous epistemologies as living and evolving traditions, and to build knowledge that is accountable to our histories, our communities, and our struggles for liberation.
Liberation Alliance Africa believes that our role is to create, nurture, and sustain the conditions through which African feminist epistemologies can once again explain our worlds and help us imagine the pluriversality of a liberatory world.
The Building Knowledge Bridges Community of Practice on Recentering African Feminist Epistemologies to prevent and respond to sexual violence is hosted by Liberation Alliance Africa (LAA Collective), a feminist, anti-colonial, pan-African collective dreaming of liberatory feminist futures by asking critical questions, raising critical consciousness, and documenting the cultural evolution of a liberated Africa. Find our first position paper here.
Written by the Liberation Alliance Africa (LAA Collective) Team