Movement Building Responses to COVID-19: Lessons from the JASS Mobilisation Fund

This article draws on the work of Just Associates (JASS), a feminist movement support organisation that strengthens the leadership and organising capacity of community-based women networks in Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica, to transform the structures that perpetuate inequality and violence. We analyse qualitative interviews and surveys drawn from recipients of the JASS mobilisation fund (JMF), an innovative financial crisis support mechanism for feminist movements. We argue that localisation strategies deployed by women’s networks supported by the JMF in response to COVID-19, challenge dominant humanitarian responses that de-centre feminist movements, local knowledge, and expertise. By accounting for local knowledge generated from long histories of movement building, building collective power, and challenging racialised and gendered responses to humanitarian crises, women’s collectives and networks supported through the JMF developed contextually relevant responses that challenge patriarchal structural barriers heightened by COVID-19

SheMurenga: The Zimbabwean Women's Movement 1995-2000

This book demonstrates the place of women's movements during a defining period of contemporary Zimbabwe. The government of Robert Mugabe may have been as firmly in power in 2000 as it was in 1995, but the intervening years saw severe economic crisis, mass strikes and protests, the start of land occupations, intervention in the war in the DRC, and the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Shereen Essof shows how Zimbabwean women crafted responses to these and other events, and aimed for a feminist agenda that would prioritise the interests of the rural and urban poor. Rejecting both the strictures of patriarchy and the orthodoxies of established feminism, she demands that Zimbabwe's women be heard in their own voices and in their own contexts. In doing so she writes a book that combines scholarly integrity with a wild, joyous cry for liberation

The Zimbabwean Women's Movement, 1995-2000

Bibliography: leaves 113-118.This research project comes out of my own 7-year engagement with the Zimbabwe women's movement. It reconstructs a herstory of Zimbabwe Women's organising with the aim of reinstating a herstory in order to challenge malestream narratives that seem intent on disappearing women. In doing this it seeks to examine the nature of women's movement in Zimbabwe during the period 1995 - 2000, which facilitates a deeper exploration of women's collective action in a challenging national context

Global movement for Black lives: A conversation between Awino Okech and Shereen Essof

This conversation reflects on the importance of transnational Black solidarity in a global moment where the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed structural inequalities that sustain Black death and the global movement for Black lives has focussed attention on anti-Blackness. We reflect on the legacies of past and contemporary Black, Indigenous, People of Colour activism and the role that this has played in strengthening transnational efforts to deal with colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy. In highlighting how anti-Blackness is sustained across different institutions - from the academy to social movements, we centre Black feminist movements’ role in building radical visions of equitable and transformative worlds through a focus on the nexus between patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy. Black feminist visions we argue are geared at disrupting and transforming current power structures to advance justice and create liberatory futures. A central part of these liberatory futures lies in building collective power that is rooted in the political values of solidarity, hope and joy

The causes and nature of the June 2016 protests in the city of Tshwane: A practical theological reflection

South Africa has recently experienced a series of public protests. The common element is that violence is becoming evident in these protests. This article uses the June 2016 protests in the city of Tshwane as an example to address the root causes of such protests. On 20 June 2016, the African National Congress (ANC) announced that the city of Tshwane mayoral candidate for the 3 August 2016 municipal elections in South Africa is the former public works minister and ANC National Executive Committee member, Thoko Didiza. Consequently, public protests in the city of Tshwane emerged immediately after this announcement. These public protests were very violent, such as protesters killed one another, burned buses, looted shops and barricaded roads. The root causes of these violent protests are identified as factionalism, tribalism, sexism, economic exclusion and patronage politics. The purpose of this article is a practical theological reflection on the root causes of June 2016 protests in the city of Tshwane. The main aim of this article is a practical theological solution to the general problem of violent protests