Jessica Horn on the African Feminist Praxis

Definitionally, the word ‘praxis’ involves the exercise of a skill, often in the customary way and usually suggesting a focus on the practical. Feminist writer Jessica Horn’s new book in the Sage Social Science for Social Justice series, African Feminist Praxis: Cartographies of Liberatory Worldmaking, explores a praxis that is eminently practical but, but her own observation, hardly customary in the Western canon.

As she tells her interviewer Meredith Clark in this video, praxis that is African and praxis that is feminist often has been carelessly – and often intentionally – excluded by majoritarian gatekeepers. In locating this, or rather these, other universes of practice, she uses the metaphor of the mapmaking. “It’s not saying that there’s only one way, this land is only one land, it’s one-dimensional, it has one name, it is one territory, and we decide,” she tells Clark, a journalist, academic and the series editor. “Rather, the effort has been to open up, to say there’s a pluriverse of understanding of what these things mean. So what we’re doing is we’re opening space for the reinterpretation, the renaming, or the reclaiming, or the process of creating new spaces. So, to me, that’s critical.”

Horn, a resident of Nairobi, is a founding member of the African Feminist Forum and was a key figure in her five years as director of programmes at the African Women’s Development Fund in the rise of the first regional African feminist futures initiative. In addition to African Feminist Praxis, she has written a Cutting Edge Pack on Gender and Social Movements for the BRIDGE/Institute for Development Studies.

A transcript of the interview appears below the video, and additional information about Horn and African feminists appears within and below the transcript.

Meredith Clark: Hello and welcome. My name is Meredith Clark, and I am pleased to be here with you today as one of the co-editors of the Sage series, Social Science for Social Justice. I’m here today to speak with one of the first authors in our series, Jessica Horn. Jessica is the author of African Feminist Praxis: Cartographies of Liberatory Worldmaking. Jessica is a feminist thinker and a builder. She sharpens our understanding of root causes of gendered injustice, and co-designs interventions that stimulate systemic challenges or changes towards tangible shifts in people’s embodied lives. She’s worked for two decades supporting activist organizations, funders and the UN to deepen analysis, shape policy and funding, and refine interventions to defend women’s rights to health, bodily autonomy and freedom from violence, and to build scenarios for feminist futures. I have to say, having read an early draft of this manuscript, I believe that Jessica is the thinker for our times. She brings to us perspectives on how we can contemporarily frame these problems from an African feminist worldview, taking into consideration our relationships with each other, with the planet and with power, with no further delay, I’d like to get into this conversation, and so I say to you, Jessica, welcome today. Thank you for joining us.

Jessica Horn: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Meredith Clark: Well, I want to get started by actually going back to the past a little bit, talking about your pursuit of African feminisms in your educational journey, but also in your development as an individual. In the early sections of the book, you talk about your time in college and where you were actively seeking these perspectives, and you could only find a volume or two or writings by African women about their feminist world views, about their feminist experiences. Tell us a little bit about the history that you have with African feminist thinkers, and what that pursuit did for you as you decided to develop this book.

Jessica Horn: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here and be in conversation with you, and also to have been reviewed by you and to have your insight and wisdom and ideas and thoughts also as part of the process of birthing this book.

I come from a lineage, multiple lineages, but that kind of converge around both academic engagement and thought writing and creative production, including in theater, but also in fiction, and then worlds of diplomacy and policy. And so I was raised on university campuses in the Global South, in what was Lesotho in the struggle against apartheid, in the South Pacific, in the Fiji Islands, in a moment again, when people were really grappling with decolonial thinking.

And so I was raised with this respect for majority understandings of the world, you know, an interest in literature, a kind of deep respect for books, and also this interest in transformation. So when I started my — and I was always an activist in secondary school when I started university, but I was always in search of the activism that linked most to my lineage, and it was so interesting to try and uncover and find any African feminist thinking in the university spaces that I was in. The reality is African feminists remain largely undocumented, but also without sufficient public publishing infrastructure that would actually, you know, allow for a widely read literature, right? And so I was on this constant search. And partly as a result of that, I became obsessed with documenting actually, and so when I started to engage in feminist activism with other African feminists and to begin to be part of African feminist movement, I realized, in retrospect, that documentation was one of my touch points. And so I have this quite big archive of photos — any space I was in I took photos, if I had a little camera or then, as we started to use camera phones, I would record video. And also in engaging in movement, I also constantly pushed the documentation agenda.

So, for example, with the African feminist forum, I was part of creating the Know Your African feminist series, which was the first print series of its kind to actually document. It’s like bios and short narratives of African feminists with photography. The coffee table book was the first incarnation, and then it turned into a film series, which is actually the first of its kind, to document that volume of African feminists. And again, it’s surprising, some of the most prominent academics and activists have never actually been captured on video, kind of explaining their practice. So again it’s sort of been a desire of mine to always contribute to this archiving and documentation, and I guess it’s then led to this book.

Meredith Clark: That’s amazing. So this ongoing praxis doesn’t limit itself to just the writing and the publication of the book, but also pulling together these different pieces of these scholars and actually capturing them and collecting their stories in vivo and making sure that they are being preserved across mediums. I love that that approach to really making sure the preservation is there for access. I want to ask you a little bit about the metaphor that structures the book. When we think about cartography, map making, understanding what a world looks like, and being able to define its terrain, we are inherently grappling with this legacy of power, right? Because to be able to make a map means that you have the power to proclaim that one direction is what it is and that another is something, whatever you name it, whatever name you give to it, that is the nomenclature that others will use for generations. I want to ask you a little bit about your selection of this metaphor and how it’s applied in the book.

Jessica Horn: So, I was searching for ways to describe what African feminisms have offered and what they’re trying to do and intervene in when it comes to power. Now the African continent and African experience is unfortunately marked by colonization. It’s unavoidable, and one of the first things colonization did was to conquer land, claim territory, and rename everything. And that was literal in the sense that the river, you know, the tree, the mountain, even the geography that would become a state, or, you know, a nation, ethnic groups. You know, all of that was renamed and remapped in ways that remain largely today. So, for example, in English colonized Africa, almost everything is still named after members of the royal family. Right? Lake Victoria, mountains, etc., are named after members of the British royal family, erasing the histories of place names, which also told us a lot about environments, about history, about legacy, so that the process of decolonization necessarily requires recharting, literally, physically the terrain.

But also, as you’re saying, what terrain does is it gives you direction. And terrain is not only physical, so it’s cosmological. You know, many peoples of this world navigate by understanding the stars and understanding alignment to the stars and their connection to them as a way of understanding self, and also in terms of, again, how and where we orient from. It’s really telling that the prime meridian of the world is in Greenwich, London, at the prime meridian. So all of time is also set, right, according to the British Empire. So, you know it to me, this thing of what, what the work has been, has been this deep process of recharting. And I think what’s been beautiful is that that re charting process has also been collective, and it’s been highly diverse.

So, what’s amazing again, in this kind of feminist, decolonial recharting of the world is offering a pluriverse. It’s not saying that there’s only one way, this land is only one land, it’s one-dimensional, it has one name, it is one territory, and we decide. Rather, the effort has been to open up, to say there’s a pluriverse of understanding of what these things mean. So what we’re doing is we’re opening space for the reinterpretation, the renaming, or the reclaiming, or the process of creating new spaces. So, to me, that’s critical.

I think the other thing about cartography is that it reminds us that actually we’re in 3-D. Also that land and terrain is part of our bodies, and we rely on the cartography to offer us our world, and so to also understand that again, as we go through this process of recalibrating, we have to actually do it in all these dimensions. It’s about, of course, the formal law and policy, the formal processes of language. You know, of structural power. It’s also about the self and the deep — you know what I speak of. There is an autopoiesis, a process of restructuring self, individually and collectively, in order, again, to be freed of these imposing, oppressive power system, and to offer back again ways of being that are that are liberatory.

Meredith Clark: When you talk about the multi-dimensional nature of this world making it makes me think and continuing on with cartography, it makes me think about the embodied practice, which you take up in the book, but also through a temporal sense, how we might consider world-making, specifically, how we might consider the legacy of our ancestors who have come before us, and what we are handing off to the generations that come after us. I wonder if there’s a consideration that you give to the temporal aspect of African feminist praxis and world-making, and what does that mean for people who are not just thinking about, as we mentioned, the flat terrain, and not just thinking about their orientation to the stars, but their orientation to each other and to their generations in either direction.

Jessica Horn: So African feminists of today exist, I think, engaging in multiple knowledge systems at the same time. So again, we’re all colonized. Unfortunately, it is what it is, right? So we understand things in linear time, and we have that language, and we think about things like, you know, the lineage of people that came before us that we learn from, and then we pass on to the next generation in order to continue. But many of us also hold other understandings of time at the same time. I’d say all African cosmologies that I’ve encountered, to be fair, there is an understanding of kind of the circularity, so the idea that people are with us and in physical form, and when they pass away, they remain with us. So the spirit, for example, of your grandmother, who may be passed in human form, could still be with you, to guide you, to offer you knowledge, to pass on healing wisdom, for example, or to intervene, to protect you, in a moment of danger. So we are able to we also have, we also have that understanding, and we carry it, maybe even silently, sometimes because it’s not understood and hard to articulate in English.

So we have this and in the movement and in feminist work, we have people who are actually able to transcend time and bring these gifts, and also open space that’s different. And again, as I was writing, so in the chapter on memory, I wrote about the process that South African feminists went through to reclaim the legacy of Winnie Mandela, particularly on her passing. And it was very difficult to write because I was trying to write also about certain interventions that channeled her spirit and kind of brought her through to be archived — the memory of her to be archived in the bodies of many, many, many, many people. Now, it was very difficult to write that. I really struggled. I thought, Do I have to go to, you know, ecumenical language, you know, because in English, it’s so Cartesian and so kind of divided that even the words don’t always exist to explain these things I’m talking about, because English is so steeped in both the body-mind dualism, the separation of the spirit and the flesh, but also in this linearity that makes you stumble. It’s hard to describe what’s happening, but again, in the practice, in the embodied understanding and in the practice of what we do, we understand it. It’s here, in our flesh we understand. And I think that that is a beautiful insight carried by many. I would say, African-American feminist interventions, for example, acknowledge that clearly. Indigenous feminist interventions from the Americas also carry that understanding. And again, it’s something that we know in our bones, we know in our flesh, and maybe doesn’t carry too well in in English, but it’s a knowing that we have. And I think when we share it with each other, we nod our heads and say, “Yeah,” because we understand what we mean.

Meredith Clark: That’s lovely. It reminds me of the limits, as you mentioned, of things like the English language and sort of the legacy of colonization, if you will, that how much is just limited in terms of expression, that even in the works that we create, the things that we write, there’s knowledge that cannot be easily transmitted. There is knowledge that is it’s necessary to engage in things like conversation like this, but also in spending time just with one another and having that expression of spirit that allows us to exchange knowledge in this way. Thank you for such a lovely contribution.

I am also thinking about you, and you mentioned this briefly, but talking about these expressions of African feminisms and again, transcending these boundaries of time, there’s something that you mentioned in the introduction of the book, and I just want to read this little snippet here. You say that African feminisms are always contemporary to the questions that exist in their time, drawing on the tools of understanding and dissent available in their context. And given the moment that we’re in, we were having a brief conversation before we actually started recording the conversation, we talked a little bit about the problem of our time being, the rise of authoritarianism throughout the world. I wanted to ask you, as people come to this book, and they read this book, and perhaps they’re looking for answers that are outside of the scholarship that they have engaged in, the limited scholarship that they may have again engaged in, the practice that they already have when they come to this, what tools do you find are available to them to deal with the problem of authoritarianism and to be able to really examine it from an African feminist perspective, or one of many African feminist perspectives, and develop praxis for themselves day to day. How do we live through the rise of authoritarianism through an African feminist worldview?

Jessica Horn: So African feminists have always organized in very, very, very tight space. I think we often, maybe because of the world’s need to erase the memory of what colonization did, sometimes we overlook the level of brutality involved in the European colonization of Africa. I mean, when you hear the systematic, brutal, sadistic ways that people were tortured and violated, their labor was usurped, forced into things. The transatlantic slave trade is an example then, but there are many, many, many more when you look at what was happening domestically and in the spaces, too, right? And so African feminisms in the contemporary expression grew out of organization against that, right? Because when we’re talking about African feminisms as feminisms that don’t just deal with gendered injustice, which of course, existed pre-colonially, but also with the racial and the white supremacist and all of the economic, right, all of that, we’re talking about struggles that began in resisting colonization. So I think it’s always very, very important, when looking at problems, to say, “Who has been the most affected historically by such and what can we learn from them?” That is something that the world usually doesn’t do. So, you know, it’s rise of authoritarianism. People treat it as something new, and then they go to experts who are people who actually have not lived through that. The hashtag #TrustBlackWomen exists for a reason, because people are saying, but, yeah, but black women have experienced this in history. Figured out ways to survive it, figured out ways to resist it. So the whole idea is to actually ask the people who know, but who know best from experience to tell us, right?

So, if I answer this, maybe just by framework to say, you know, I’ve structured the book around five chapters because I was looking at the kind of threads, or axes, right of organization in African communism, and so to maybe just go through those to offer. So the first is kinship. One of the things that authoritarian regimes do is always to begin by stating that there is a promised community of some kind, and then there is an “other.” And authoritarianism always rises on the basis of violence against the other. There’s always some community who is blamed for the problems of the time and who is in and who, then whomever is then deemed to be the promised people are usually incited to hate to the point of willingness to kill, right? Usually, it’s often a genocidal mentality, and it’s this idea of a hatred through violence, through disrespect and disregard.

So African feminisms have always taken very seriously kinship and the idea that we belong to each other, all of us, we belong to each other, and there is no way to achieve balanced society and to achieve cohesive living in this world if we do not begin with a fundamental idea that we belong to each other and that all of us have a personhood that requires mutual respect. So again, I think that the praxis, the praxis that is around defending women, gender non-conforming people, around defending people who are minoritized in different ways, including in those constituencies, is a process of saying we are all people, and our work is to affirm the personhood of others. And where we find that difficult, we do the work — theoretically, emotionally, politically — to figure out how to make regimes that include everyone. It’s not good enough to allow ourselves to rest in this kind of simplified discriminations. It’s not good enough as humans to do that. So it’s always a call to kinship and to acknowledge the fundamental kinship of humanity.

The second thing, of course, that it takes is courage. And again, in the book, in the chapter on courage, I detail the incredible ways, very brave ways that African feminists have resisted, and they’ve resisted again, levels of violation that are kind of at, you know, stratospheric, right, and found very creative ways to resist, but always again with this based on this kind of fundamental belief in a bigger vision, and so to summon courage. Now, part of that courage also requires really thinking about care, because, you know, people resist, and again, I detail in the book how people resist and lose, resist and lose. One of the basic ways that people have lost is by just literally the process of not recognizing their contribution. And again, I think, for any minoritized community in the world, you know what I mean, that you do all of these things, you risk your life, you lose your children, you risk you lose your land, you lose your things, only for people to turn around and say, “Who are you anyway? You’re not worth it.” Or, you know, “You actually haven’t made a contribution,” or to claim someone else did it. That’s kind of our histories. We know that.

We need to take care and, you know, I look at the ways, you know, from the movement of women living with HIV, for example, to you know, ways that people have built up contemporary practices around, you know, retreats and things like that, but all of that is a process of care, of taking care of each other, acknowledging that our inner lives matter, and that ultimately, this abuse that’s happening externally has its emotional impact, and that that emotional impact is political, so that the care of the emotional is as political as dealing again with the questions of the economy or the questions of mainstream politics.

Now these regimes of authoritarian disrespect always make it so the violation of us pleasurable. It’s funny to laugh at women, it’s funny to laugh and be racist, right? It’s enjoyable, it’s entertainment, right? And so in the reclamation of pleasure lies a potent reclamation of power, that when we reclaim our pleasure, and I talk about how pleasure in African environments, again across context, is deeply esthetic. It’s not just about the sexual body, although that is part of it, because we acknowledge that the sexual body is a part of us, but it’s about an esthetic reclaiming of space and a deep, again, esthetic reclaiming of the ability to be in the world which is linked to which is pleasurable. So we resist this erasure, and we resist this violation by reclaiming pleasure, right?

And the last thing, then, is to really think about memory, you know, and memory is the final chapter. But again, to say that as we resist, we must always tell, we must always tell, because what happens with our resistance is that it’s always erased. So again, the histories that we know well of say, for example, anti-slave response is always framed as something that white intervenors did, which they did, but even individual slaves resisted, and it’s the same thing in African feminist context. Independent struggles African feminists were integral, in fact, in some cases, pivotal, in the ability to actually contest colonial regimes, and it gets erased. So again, as we counter authoritarianism, how do we think about memory making, whereas the poetry, the photography, the film, the documentation, the writing, the process of collective remembering, the process of, again, invoking people who walk with us because they’ve been doing this work before, and their role in guiding us, also in their insights in terms of understanding what we need to do now to change the world. We all have a right to justice, and we all have a right to thrive.

Meredith Clark: Bringing us back to the beginning of our conversation where you talk about your efforts to again, retrieve pieces of memory across medium and bring them together. It’s such a lovely way to think about how preservation and its role and its importance in demonstrating what African feminist praxis looks like. Thank you so much for this I and I for anyone watching this conversation, I just have to note that listening to you talk is the same as reading your words in print, that the lyricism and the voice and the depth and the recollection of all of these different narratives and experiences and perspectives is all there. So I’m very excited for everyone to have your work in their hands as I read through this book and as I converse with you today, I’m reminded of a question that always comes to me. Anyone who has written, whether it’s an email or a book, we all know that there’s something that has to be left out. Either it’s because it’s not appropriate to be said in a particular forum or to a certain audience, or sometimes it’s because we want to hold something back for ourselves, for our community, it’s a matter of discretion, or perhaps it moves on to another project in the future. I’m wondering you’ve covered in this book, cartography of reverence and these ideas of kinship, courage, care and pleasure, and thinking about how African feminist praxis is enacted and memory in terms of how it is preserved. But is there something in this book that actually is not in this book? Is there something that you had to make the decision to leave out, or you decided proactively to leave out? And if so, where, where you might you take it up in the future?

Jessica Horn: Well, I guess the two things, one is just the volume of stories. So actually, there were so many like interventions that I wanted to mention and so many people that I wanted to reference. I took a citational approach that was literally to just give respect where respect is due in every instance, right? And to, just like, if the person hadn’t written, or the movements hadn’t written, I just, you know, interviewed them and got the information. So there’s quite a bit of referencing in there that’s from personal communication, because I’m like, You know what? This is critical work that needs to be written in print, because print is the way that we acknowledge knowledge, you know, in this knowledge economy that we operate in. So there are many, many stories I feel like went in there.

The other thing is actually, like critique, you know, because there are some interventions that I had questions about, or I felt were could have been, you know, the elements of it that I think could have been better. But I sat back and I thought, “You know what? Actually, I’m gonna have grace with all of this, every contribution has been a contribution.” What happens often in movements is that, because we’re so close to it, and because it means so much to us, we often get into this point of friction. And, you know, this point of friction, and of kind of saying, like, oh, it could have been like this, it could have been like that, or you should have mentioned these people, and it was actually these people, and not these people all of that. And I just thought, actually, it’s unnecessary. All of these contributions that I’m referencing and engaging are contributions to the process of a freedom, of a collective freedom. And we’re all incomplete, and all work is incomplete. But it is done in the spirit of an offering towards our collective freedom. And so for me, I felt that that was, that was important, particularly because, again, there is so little of the praxis that’s written in these forums. I think there’s, again, it’s, you know, it’s scattered in different places, but far less in the form of academic books, and so I actually just felt that it was important to just state it there. But some of it I’d like to nuance, you know, I’d like to actually get into, but that can be for later.

Meredith Clark: And that’s my last question for you. Where are you going later? Your writing has been published in outlets as varied as The Lancet, Feminist Africa, Al Jazeera Africa, Africa is a Country, and now this book, what’s next for you in terms of your writing and other work that you’re putting out into the world?

Jessica Horn: So the process of writing this book I talk about was like a process of ceremony, and you know, it was intentionally invoking all of these movements and people and contributions and energies, and so even the process of putting the book out into a world, I want to continue in that spirit. I want to share more and be in conversation with to also, like I said, encourage more engagement and understanding and knowledge and people to keep digging deeper. I would love to be actually provoking other people to write. We don’t have enough written. And that’s one thing I realized that I was doing the research – what is written, there are, like, very few books, like, really a small number of books, in a comparative sense, for a continent of this size. There’s a lot of things in paywall journal articles, you know, and then there’s things that are scattered in, I guess, you know, the gray literature that isn’t always again, acknowledged in academia. So I hope it’s a provocation for others to write.

In my own work I have always been a kind of a “what next” person. I’m always interested in thinking about futures and you know, anticipating what’s happening and encouraging that, thinking around that. And so I’m going to go even deeper into that. I also am into what these days we call imagination work, but that’s always been the thing that’s fascinated me in the space of my greatest interest. So for me, I again, want to look back at these stories and look back at the energies that I look at in the book, and then see how to summon them into conjuring greater imagination about how we transform the world. We’re in this together, you know, and we have to just do it. I think you know, once you’ve seen as many activists as I have seen, you can’t unsee it. Once you’ve seen injustice, you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. And it’s very difficult actually, to disassociate yourself from the work of seeking to transform it in whatever way makes sense to you at the time, and the collective that you’re a part of at the time and in what’s available to you. But I will always be part of the process of seeking to contribute to more just worlds.

Meredith Clark: Thank you so much, Jessica, it’s such a pleasure to have this conversation with you. I’m very much looking forward to people being able to sit with your words, read your words and look for your work out in the world. We appreciate your time.

Jessica Horn: Thank you so much. This has been a total pleasure.

Additional resources

 Celebrating Herstory through Song [film]. 2021. Dir. Sihle Hope. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzIpyJuIE4g

Memory and unmemory of feminist warriors and struggles. South Feminist Futures festival [panel discussion]. 2020 . Available at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-KGQzvyGE4&list=PLFgMurnjwVe0U7nJNPhMakFvbxeLLv3_l&index=2 

On Africa’s feminist frontlines, we need care to sustain our movements”. Jessica Horn, 2019. Available at  https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/on-africas-feminist-frontlines-we-need-accessible-care-practices-to-sustain-our-movements/