Our Voices. Our Revolution: Amplifying African Women’s Presence Online

Her Zimbabwe.

The name came to me on a slow Sunday afternoon in the kitchen as I washed the dishes.

My best friend and I had spent a good part of the last week trying to figure out a name for the project, with ideas ranging from the farcical to the impossible. One that I had particularly liked was ‘Shemurenga,’ a play on the word Chimurenga — which is a local term used to refer to the different waves of nationalist response to the colonial effort. I wanted to begin a revolution along the same lines; but a women’s revolution of thought and critique and analysis online.

In the end, however, I went with Her Zimbabwe, the name coming quite unexpectedly but feeling so apt. The logo and tagline for the project also followed quite naturally.

Her Voice. Her Revolution.

With boundless naivety and inspiration, I began to work towards what this project looked like in my mind, making sketches of the platform and possible contributors and beneficiaries. I am not normally so convicted by the ideas that I have, but this one definitely took over me with sleepless nights and excited energy features of my daily life at that time.

It is now just under four years since Her Zimbabwe launched on a cool March morning with a friend blaring a vuvuzela, the promise of revolution stirring. And in the years since, I have learned that beginning a revolution — or at least feeding into one — is not as easy as it might seem.

Zimbabwe is not an easy environment for many reasons. The damage of an insular and autocratic politics is beginning to show quite clearly, even among those who would be considered our intellectuals, with many peddling a brand of intellectualism that speaks to factional politics and partisanship. The middle ground, if it ever existed, is now all but lost. Nuance and complexity have been discarded, with those promoting them deemed to be politically suspicious, or simply being ignored.

Her Zimbabwe seeks to promote intellectualism among young Zimbabwean women, and the task is complicated by these factors, and many others which include parochial and sexist representations of women in the media and the decreased impetus to think in a country where public discourse thrives on political hearsay and sexual scandal.

So how do we fix this?

It’s a big question that I am not sure can be fully answered without larger structural changes that will affect Zimbabwean society on a broader scale. And it is a problem that I know does not just affect Zimbabwean women.

From my interactions with women — young and old — in different parts of Africa, I see that this is a bigger issue than is contained by borders, cultures and tribes. And I feel strongly that creating spaces for African women - by African women - to talk to each other, to aggregate alternative content AND to create access points for such voices in mainstream media is an important strategy for beginning to influence public discourse in a more structured and sustained way.

I am already doing this through Her Zimbabwe, which features a Her Africa section, which aggregates content from contributors from across the continent on issues that intersect across contexts. One article, for example, is by a Kenyan contributor - Beth Nduta - who wrote, late in 2014, about the #MyDressMyChoice campaign in Kenya against the public stripping of women deemed to be dressed inappropriately by a group of male public transport touts. In it, she describes scenarios that are eerily similar to those experienced by Zimbabwean women;

“I recently overheard two men in a restaurant having a discussion over the incident, and one of them shared a video of the stripping. The one who was watching the video, said that he thought he would also get the men he knew to do the same for him; that is, have them strip a woman for him.

They guffawed at the idea as they dug into their food, the thought never occurring to either that women had rights to their own personal choices about their bodies.”

The intersections are further pronounced by the fact that Her Zimbabwe, on the very same day, carried coverage of a press conference where Zimbabwean activists and feminists spoke out against the stripping of a young woman in downtown Harare for the same ‘offense’ Nduta writes about from a Kenyan context (watch the video below at 11:05 minutes to listen to one of the most vocal speakers that afternoon). The coverage would go on to receive further airplay via the BBC’s Focus on Africa and various other platforms.

What more is possible through such reciprocal listening across the continent, I often ask myself. And how can more of these narratives be aggregated and documented so that African women, and Africans in general, become more conscious about them; and also so that mainstream media reports about them?

This is the line of thought I am having with thinking through a new concept that will expand the work of Her Africa into a platform and service that connects and aggregates feminist narratives and the work of feminist bloggers, while also creating opportunities for publication in the mainstream media through building partnerships with media houses for more progressive content.

It’s still a nascent thought, but one which I feel fills an important gap and takes the work of Her Zimbabwe to a more continental space where hopefully, the impact of conversations online is amplified to begin to build enough pressure for a more reflective and responsive continent that listens to its women’s very important voices.