On Becoming Human: Post-Nationalism and Radical Feminism in Africa: Patricia McFadden in conversation with T.D. Harper-Shipman

Note: Continuing the Miami Institute’s forum, “Reckoning with Empire,” T.D. Harper-Shipman now shares with us a conversation between herself and Patricia McFadden on post-nationalism and radical feminism in Africa. At the end of this interview, McFadden stresses: “Rather than saying, you know we are African feminists and remaining locked in nationalism, we need a deeper, more unequivocal critique of nationalism. It doesn't serve us. It's narrow, and it's tired, and it's exhausted. We need to remove ourselves from it and step into the new worlds that are waiting for us as beautiful human beings.” Throughout this forum at the Miami Institute— curated by Harper-Shipman—Harper-Shipman is interviewing “academics and activists who are thinking actively with and against empire from different vantage points.”

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: I’m so glad to be in conversation with you again, Patricia.  

Patricia McFadden: We had a beautiful conversation two years ago with the Black Women Writing African Politics Collective. It was such a lovely moment for me, because I long for those moments, and of course time has changed so much. Distance means new things now. And it will keep on changing, and we just adjust. I realize that being radical is fundamentally the ability to be able to celebrate life regardless of the barriers. There are no barriers when you're radical right? So, to be with you and the sisters in that moment was just such a precious gift.

T. D. Harper-Shipman: This time, I decided to do a forum on empires. The idea is to engage with scholars, activists and artists who are both thinking about the mechanics of imperialism and deploying different tools and modalities for grappling with imperialism.

Patricia McFadden: Sounds absolutely wonderful. And actually, Takiyah, you have taken me back to a political and theoretical tradition that really nurtured my earliest steps towards becoming a radical person, much earlier than becoming a radical feminist. It was confronting empire. Of course, most of the learning on imperialism was done through the voices, perceptions, and ideas of white men. These white men were rejecting the sort of homogenization of all people in the imperialist centers. Western radicals speak of empires, of course, because they’re conscious of the need to separate themselves from the imperial state. But they live in those societies. They benefit from them and from colonial plunder, whether they're feminists, whether they are working class radicals. They all benefit from colonial extraction and exploitation in numerous ways.

You’ve taken me back to that place, and I often battle with that relationship. It’s a relationship of being, of being part of internationalism as constituted by the resistance of all humans who have a consciousness about justice and fairness. This is an important tradition which informs my own consciousness, even as it is riddled with contradictions of whiteness, class privilege, being colonized, etc.

Empire! Oh, the concept is massive. I mean the whole idea seems otherworldly even though we know that it has been realized and played out on our black bodies and lives. And for me, I no longer want to undo anything anymore.  Undoing is an epistemological trap. It’s a trap that is spawned by Nationalism. It comes from the desire to be something that we were not. We have invented something that we believe we were, but we don't actually know if we were that.  Then we get locked into it. That is why I do not respond to De-colonial discourse. I am not interested in it, and I find it boring because it is anti-colonialism rehashed. You see, it is a nationalist discourse that has become eclipsed by the contemporary moment.

“Undoing” serves the interest of a small group of elites who reproduce a particular discourse and a particular narrative about who we think we were. But most of the past, in many ways is invented. All societies invent the past, and usually that invention is driven by the interests of the ruling classes and the intellectuals who service the ruling classes. They recycle it. They adorn it. It becomes a place of status, longing and belonging.  And, it is seductive, given the massive destruction wrought upon our cultural and emotional psyche as African people everywhere we live.  But it is a mere nationalist invention, a chimera, mostly a fiction which eludes critical class, gendered and other necessary engagements. 

We must dispense with “undoing” to create the alternative to the Empire. We must. Of course, there are many ways in which we have already been doing this. The very fact that we've been fighting imperialism from the very beginning means that we've already put the foundation stones in place.

T.D. Harper-Shipman: I find myself nodding vigorously when reading your careful nuancing of African feminist politics. More and more, liberal African feminism becomes the stand-in for African feminism. Scholars often pay little attention to divergent political and economic traditions across African feminist projects. Your work, though, always makes these distinctions (also pointing to the places where they converge). What is at stake when we collapse all African feminist scholarship and activism into a singular project—and especially when that project is a liberal one?

Patricia McFadden: Yes, I enjoyed reading that question. I always give credit to Paula Gunn Allen, who was a Native American feminist.  She wrote about leaving the reservation. She really gifted me with an idea of the freedom of flight. Not flight from fear, but flight as a natural motion--flight as a natural part of being a human in time, space, and in motion. What you did with the question was you gave it a finesse that enables me to think more carefully and more creatively about the divergences and the convergences. I love that.

Thinking about feminism in Africa, I prefer to come to it as being feminist in Africa, rather than naming it African feminism. For a long time, I didn't actually feel uncomfortable with the idea of African feminism. It was still very much suffocated and located within nationalist sensibilities. We, as women who rebel, begin to mirror the restrictions, the constraints, and the limitations of Nationalism. That is, until we actually start to create our own epistemological and discursive spaces where we form new languages and new ideas--new ways of looking at ourselves. When I understood how much seepage of nationalist conservatism had entered our rebellious politics, I realized that I needed to do more than segue from this male-centered ideology and politics. I needed to actually leave the reservation of Nationalism. I had to go outside of it. Step away.  Then I would be able to embrace all of the opportunities and possibilities that women's resistance gifts us. That is why Contemporarity is so powerful, because it allows me to step out of those discursive sites that are defined, owned, controlled, and driven by males, whether white or Black. On this continent women's politics are driven by Black male, nationalist discourse. Who are the leading scholars of De-colonial Studies? So, I would rather think of it as “feminism in Africa” rather than “African feminism”.

The second thing is that I am uncomfortable with putting African in front of my feminism. I am a self-declared, proud feminist. I'm not an African feminist. I used to be. That doesn't take away from my Africanness or from my feminism, but I don't want to put the two together.  When you do that, you get locked into a certain narrative about poor women who struggle in Africa—who they supposedly are and who they can be. For a long time, it was about women and development, then gender and development. Nobody wanted to name themselves feminist, except the heretical rebels.  In fact, it was considered an insult. You know, it was considered ‘un-Africa’. When I think about feminism in Africa, I can think about it in several interesting ways. But if I locate myself in the notion of African feminism, then it becomes singular, homogenized and very constrained.

If you look across the continent, the homogenization of women's politics is not just by the women themselves, because of their relationships with nationalists and Nationalism, especially now that Black men are in the State. There is another layer of homogenization. We become herded into particular directions of political thought.  We cannot produce feminist theory in the African context, for our feminist praxis, if we don't leave the Nationalist Reservation, if we don't stop calling ourselves African feminists and un-tether ourselves from the post of Black Nationalism.

In my work I have referred to the benefits of being an African woman on a continent where we have long resisted and struggled against colonialism. My generation came into our political consciousness and radical identity in the liberation struggle, because all the gates were to keep us out as women and as humans. The only way for us to become publicly political was to participate in anti-colonial resistance, which was organized by the men. There is a whole legacy, a whole genre of literature on women resisting through and within liberation movements. But after that, we have to leave the Nationalists because if we don't, we will go down with them! You can see across the continent the Nationalist project has reached is nadir. It's finished. The people are rising! Okay, the rising is sporadic and erratic and looks like it's chaotic. But it's happening. And those who have attached themselves to these States and their elites, to the ruling classes, those women are going down with them.

T.D. Harper-Shipman: But this is also a wonderful way to broach the next question. Your work routinely engages citizenship as being delimited by patriarchy, whiteness, and capital. We often think of citizenship as a domestic project. But your writings situate citizenship within a broader imperial project. For example, in Globalizing Resistance you state, “The bonds between the Dick Cheneys of America and the Bothas of Southern Africa are as old and as deep as the ties that bind us as African women/people who continue to resist white supremacy in all its forms”(p.19). Can you say more about how you came to understand the relationship between citizenship in Africa and Western empires?

Patricia McFadden: Yes, it's a very interesting interface. When we started this conversation earlier, I referred to the ignominy of Europe as a place of existence and the normalization of plunder and impunity that lies at the heart of capitalism. We know that mercantilism was the vehicle that provided Europe entry into what they define as the modern world. They are the same people, which is why South Africa is so deeply, deeply problematic.  South Africa is the quintessential representation of that compromise with the Black self. South Africa speaks to the deepest compromises that we, as African people, have made with white impunity and supremacy. And that compromise lies at the core of Black Nationalism.

Now, we often think about Nationalism in these very glorious and triumphal ways. But that's just the fluff, the triumphalism. It's the nice feeling. At the core of it is a patriarchal capacity that men learn as males in all societies, to collude with each other and to compromise the integrity of other humans over whom they have power, or over whom they aspire to have power. Nelson Mandela is the quintessential example of this. The ones who represent the compromise come out of the communities of those who resist impunity, racism, supremacy, all the violence and the vulgarity of it. They come from those community but then act in solidarity with the oppressor. And in all our societies, they enter into a compromise with the representatives of the Empire.

These flawed men, like Mandela, become reified (by the beneficiaries of Empire and colonial plunder) as a protective guise against political and social criticism. They become deities, untouchables, you see. The ones who refuse to enter the compromise – that leveler among all men – are eliminated, wiped out.  They are Cabral, Sankara, Lumumba, Hani, Biko - Black men who refused to ‘whitewash’ colonialism and racism.

But, it's not Mandela, the person, who is the entire problem.  It's how he represents a particular expression of patriarchal solidarity among men, where race, class, all of it doesn't really matter. Only wealth, power, and privilege reign supreme among them. You know that at the core of patriarchy is a solidarity that men learn and share and consolidate repeatedly amongst themselves, so that they can maintain their hold over power. It is one of the most distinctive and most persevering characteristics of Patriarchy as a system.  And that is why I make that link. I make that connection. It's a nexus. And if we don't have the courage to critique and go to the heart of it, then we never reach the critical consciousness that enables us to understand why we remain oppressed as women and as working people. We remain excluded as large numbers of humans on the earth who don't control or own or exercise power. You know, we are the ones that we've been waiting for, said June Jordan.

T.D. Harper-Shipman: Language—its power and its promise—is a tool that you both implement and champion against imperialism. In “Writing as or for Resistance” (2016), you refer to language as “refuge”. In Contemporarity, you also describe it as an  “a wide-open doorway to intellectual and personal freedom” but also as an “effective weapon in instilling conformity in people” (2018, 423). You’ve said that patriarchy attempts to subdue our “creativity, imagination, and sensibilities of freedom”. What is the difference between writing for freedom and writing for professional advancement, especially for radical feminists in academia? Do academic journals and books contribute to this patriarchal, capitalist project? What are the other modalities for writing ourselves into freedom?

Patricia McFadden: Okay, so you have 3 big questions there. The middle one, you already know, because when you enter the Academy, the space constrains you. It’s just the formalization of the ideas and outcomes that women have produced through struggle. The academy is a place where you should actually elect to enter. It shouldn't be an existential imperative for many of us because it is a site of power. We don't control the mechanisms by which knowledge is produced, we only process it within the academy. The Academy is not a place of freedom. That is just rhetoric.  It's a factory. It's a factory in the way that capitalism requires sites of production that support the interests of the rulers.  Rosemary Hennessy has a gorgeous book entitled Materialist Feminism, where she speaks about this issue. There are some very interesting pieces of feminist literature that speak to the inadequacies of the Academy and its inability to push the agenda of feminist freedom. 

Writing for freedom! I was speaking about how important it is for us to recognize the legacies of writing, of articulation, of celebration and of voice. Look at the ways in which Empire attempts to silence and demean us. Imperialism has fabricated claims of ignorance, of nothingness and of silence on our part. It presumes that we have nothing to say. Meanwhile, of course, they pillage, and they take everything that we have said and written. Then they become the voice. They become the speakers, the knowers, the producers of knowledge. You can see it in our academies across the continent and even in the North. To disrupt that, we have to bring freedom and writing together because it is at the interface of freedom and writing that we find joy. That is where we find clarity and the insights of why humans write. Africans invented many alphabets across the continent, but these linguistic technologies were appropriated and hidden in western museums. Thereafter, they “discovered us” because after all they have always been on the tail end of the human trajectory.

So, for them, as supremacists, they have to appropriate it and make it seem as though they're the ones who are validating us. We only exist because they have “discovered” us. But writing ourselves into resistance is a different dimension. Writing ourselves into resistance requires crafting a new language. This is where feminism really is a steppingstone for us into that particular project. Feminism enables us to create a consciousness of ourselves through words that speak to us about our dreams and our courage. I’m very selfish with feminist concepts, words, and terms. I don't agree that we should share our language with everybody. No. That is just a form of liberalism that waters down the sharpness and the effectiveness of the language that we create so as to enter our freedom. Relearning our integrity and our beauty by using language and words that not only say who we are and who we were, but who we are becoming.

That is why I appreciate you making the distinction between the two, you see. They do interface. I don't want to say “intersect” because I'm letting go of “intersecting”.  It’s been so appropriated. The term has been terrorized by the conservative academy. We know where it comes from-- articulating the lived realities of black women in the world, you know. And of course, when we take these concepts into the academy and we locate them within particular spaces, we are praised and given trophies. We enjoy the sound of the chorus and the clapping.  But we don't realize how they are actually appropriating our concepts and our language. That is what has happened to intersectionality.  Whether we bring our language to them or not, they come find it and repurpose it. They come into our organizations. They are always hunting! They are predators. Power over people cannot exist without predation.

T.D. Harper-Shipman: That reminds me of the Lucille Clifton quote, “People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated”. That desire to be celebrated, to center the self, is enchanting, but it can obscure so much violence. It’s like how Silvia Federici talks about the enchantment of capitalism.

Patricia McFadden: I love Silvia because she has a radical intellect that is such a special gift. It takes us to the question that you raised about consumption and capitalism. Capitalism is a system that functions through insatiable consumption. It is about addiction, consumption, and the toxicity of capitalism. Consumerism as a habit that we learn is a function of a much deeper negative energy that drives plunder, accumulation, greed, and insatiability - never having enough. This insatiability drives all the different social formations that were created at the founding of Patriarchy as an ever-evolving system of impunity, extraction and privilege.

It starts with the animals - what we call animals - the other living, sentient beings. That is where we begin. We bring them into our abode, domesticate them, exploit them, brutalize, buy, and sell them, and eventually murder them and consume them as ‘meat’. Because we have acquired such deep contempt for them, we feel nothing about industrializing them and performing all kinds of cruel and degrading practices upon their being.  They have become commodities to be exchanged and consumed.

This violence and impunity which we exact upon ‘animals’ is soon extended to women and enslaved humans, and these practices and beliefs which eventually become ideologies that legitimate impunity and greed, form the foundations of the State and of class, racial and other forms of privilege in both the private and the public. You can see the trajectory, right? After that, it is the land and everything on and under it, until we arrive at where humans are today, in the very crucible of an existential crisis.

We haven't spoken about activism and transforming the ways in which we make feminist revolutions. Very seldom is feminism coupled with the term revolution. When we think about revolution, we think of men. We think of Che Guevara and Amilcar Cabral among the few who have dared to live their courage and principles.  We don’t actually bring feminism and revolution together very often. But feminism is the most powerful and profound revolution that humans have been engaged in since the moment of human consciousness. I am speaking of humans who live in female bodies. We have been engaged in this revolutionary process from the moment that Patriarchy emerged, you know, and Feminism as a resistance politics is just one moment in that long and arduous revolutionary journey. It reflects the convergence of varied struggles, moments, strategies and knowledge, which are meeting at a particular historical time. It is a conjuncture, an expression of who we have become and are as female humans – along our journey of life on the planet. Feminism is a sense of being, of joy and celebration, but also of resoluteness that the battle against Patriarchy is enduring and hazardous and it is one which we must win.

T.D. Harper-Shipman: How is your own kind of daily practice constantly interrogating and up ending and advancing new ways of existing. We all practice our politics daily, whether we are aware of it or not. But you aim to practice your radical Black feminist politics with intention. Veganism and living off the grid are essential parts of that. Your consumption habits inherently challenge the global trade and consumption practices that prove integral to imperial capitalism. I’m interested in thinking through ways to practice Black radical feminist politics, particularly those around consumption and relationships to land in the metropoles.

Patricia McFadden: It is interesting that you mentioned the “metropole”, because, of course, I live in what is called the “periphery”. But I don't like to use those dichotomous expressions. I live in a place that exists in and of itself, within its own right to exist on the planet. But I appreciate what you're saying, because it helps us heuristically to think about how the world has been divided into centers and peripheries through the Imperial project, the creation of whiteness, and the idea of superior beings. I think about living here on this mountain, one of the oldest mountains in the world, and I feel so privileged. But it is also very hard. This mountain is situated in a very repressive feudal dictatorship. Here is a monarchy that is extremely patriarchal in very old ways and resistant to newness and to becoming contemporary. When I hear Black nationalists say that Patriarchy is a European invention (the same way they say that feminism is just white women's politics) I am amazed at how people can be in such denial. I mean, it's so obvious that this patriarchy is old. It's ancient and deep seated in the very bones of humans. To deny it is such foolishness. 

So, I live here on this mountain. I was born here almost 73 years ago.  I grew up in a British colony. When I came back here in my sixties, having lost my son (actually, he left) I realized that I could only remain on the planet if I found my courage. I had found courage to challenge the tropes and the stereotypes in the African Women's movement, which is a gendered nationalist movement. I had stepped away and declared that I was leaving. I told them, “I'm no longer part of this women's movement” after encountering years of backlash for being radical and an out feminist. I am now naming this particular kind of hatred and malice ‘Radixphobia’ - the fear and hatred of radicals.  We are raised to long for belonging in Nationalism. It is part of crafting the patriarchalized female. We often give up most of ourselves so that we can become custodians of narratives that are about protecting everyone else and being altruistic - the giving of everything. You know, Patriarchy is so complex. It's so intense! That is why feminists on this continent need to do the theoretical work and step away from the limitations of Nationalism. Nationalism will not enable us to write new theories, create new words, or craft new imaginaries so that we can build new worlds. It won't. Nationalism is in its sunset years, and we have to relocate ourselves to new ideological and discursive sites.

There’s also the seduction of being in a crowd. All of the Leftist narrations of resistance are about collectivism. It's about being part of a collective. You know the ideology--we all have to be the same, learn the same thing, and then do it. This is exactly what the status quo does when it patriarchalizes women. We are socialized into becoming women in particular ways. You see, it's a particular strategy that humans use. We have learnt this. We have normalized it even in our resistance politics.

So I decided to step off the grid, out of the system. I found the amazing resources--the largesse that I had acquired through resisting and through my politicized veganism. There is a fundamental difference between simply consuming ‘plant=based food’ and becoming began. The former is simply an adaptation to the consumptive and human existential crisis that has been spawned by class and greed, by impunity and supremacy.  The latter – becoming vegan – is a progressive process in radical self-conscientization and awareness of the essentialness of Nature and of having a continuous, mutually respecting relationship with all living beings.  

Becoming vegan has heightened my consciousness and my body’s awareness of itself. As the toxins in polluted and contaminated ‘food’ made me sicker and increasingly my dis-ease, I realized that by becoming vegan I was actually releasing my body from the addictions and trauma that I had absorbed from normalized food’ – particularly meat. Over the past 30 plus years I've tried to explain to people who consume traumatized, mauled, and brutalized animal flesh the consequences of such practices for themselves and for other sentient life, and for the planet of course.

 I realized that having come back here to this repressive dictatorship, there was no way I could do activism in the ways I had for the previous 50 years of my adult life, when activists came together as a group  to make change. Here, you’re not even allowed to speak with more than two people in public.  If you stand in the street in my little town, and there are two or three people together, talking, the securities will be circling you within a matter of minutes.

The world is like that. We think that it only happens in other places. But everywhere where we live, Takiyah, the repressive mechanisms of imperialism and militarization are suffocating us. Look at the response to Black Lives Matter, or Fees Must Fall. Just look at those more recent uprisings. How they were systematically suppressed, but not crushed, of course, because they can't crush the desire to be free.

So here, too, I have found new ways of doing activism. I do the activism with Patricia. We do activism for us. She and I in the field! And we learn from the resilience of the crops that I grow. There are plants that can survive on very little water, until the next rain. There are others that are really affected by the environmental crisis, and I can see the ways that they are learning to adapt and adjust. I celebrate that and learn from it.

These are little expressions of activism in my own life.  We must invent the new ways of doing the political work, you see.  For me, living in this place, which is one of the least “developed” areas in this country, I find new ways of talking with people around me about their bodies and how they have lived and are living in them. I make mixtures of herbal plants to ease their discomfort and pain, to help them unlearn the toxic eating habits of generations of colonized consumption, and to think about how their bodies are the most precious place to be.

In my production of life, I don't employ labor because I don't want to be part of the master servant system. It’s a very hard choice that I have made but I get a lot out of the ‘hardness’ of working the land on my own and doing all my domestic work – washing by hand so that I can use the rinse water on my fruit trees and the rose that hugs the corner of my little house – she thanks me by staying in bloom for most of the year. I process my crops using the sun and preserve as much as I can by bottling or freezing. I reuse and recycle as much as I can, always remembering that when something goes ‘off’, and I put it into the compost that both I and the earth will benefit from that.  Being vegan lies at the heart of a new, lived, contemporary feminist politics, and the rewards are physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological - the entire spectrum of human existence.

 That’s what I mean by bringing all the legacies together. And then you realize how beautiful it is to be a free human being, especially as a Black human being in a female body who is free, you know, living her freedom. You know it's gorgeous. Instead of being bogged down by the stress of the toxicity and the repression and the surveillance, you step away from it.

This environmentally driven crisis is also teaching us how to read the world and ourselves in new ways, and to resituate ourselves in the new and emerging struggles, to imagine new forms of activism, while continuing to give ourselves pleasure.  That is Contemporarity.

T.D. Harper-Shipman: Contemporarity teaches me something new every time that I think with the concept. One of my favorite lines is that contemporarity grows out of “the inadequacy both of feminism as a universal politics of women’s resistance to patriarchal repression…and the ‘seepage’ of nationalist ideology into feminist discourses on the continent”(p 418). The last time that you spoke with the Black Women Writing African Politics Collective, you also explained how the concept grapples with the coloniality of time. Part of the colonial project (and even the feudal patriarchal aims of nationalism in Africa) is to keep a particular class of women and marginalized groups in an a-temporal hold, aiming to neutralize their ability to impact contemporary politics. How does contemporarity upset colonial notions of time? What makes this concept uniquely radical and feminist?

Patricia McFadden: Such beautiful questions. Contemporarity is exciting and thrilling! It brings together most of the energies that have inspired me throughout my existence as a feminist human. I'm in the middle of thinking through new work, around aging and ageism. Ageism is a particularly vile expression of sexism and misogyny.  Now that I have arrived at elderhood, I realize just how common and largely unquestioned it is. There’s barely any critique of it in the feminist movement anywhere. And yet, women have always lived longer than males.  We live longer because we've learned to survive Patriarchy. But we fall right back into those tropes of being grannies and nanas and old women when we become elderly.  It’s like an acceptance, finally, after all the years of fighting to be seen, heard, and recognized, that we are ‘just women’ after all.

I’m just so upset about it. Everywhere I go, someone is trying to erase my entire life – everything I have done, achieved, and fought for.  They insist on calling me ‘mother’, or ‘granny’ or ‘gogo’ – what the hell is that.  That is not my name— if you don’t know my name, ask me, I will tell you.  But I am definitely not a granny or a ‘gogo’.   Ageism depoliticizes us. Patriarchy takes every chance it can to depoliticize women and push us back into the traditional stereotypes. For me, fighting ageism is like a whole new battle. I never thought about it until I arrived here.  But that is the beauty of feminism.  Every phase, every step of my life unveils new challenges, new struggles and new pleasures and possibilities to grow and expand my senses of self and being.

I think about of my childhood and how I became a female in a particular way. Then I experienced the moment of flight out of the cage. Marilyn Frye writes on “compulsory heterosexuality” and she inspired me by using the metaphor of “the cage”. You can't see the bars; they are invisible bars. But what Patriarchy does is lock us into this cage. It uses our bodies while also denying us access to resources in our societies. “The cage” is a means of infantilization, which is also built into Patriarchy. When we speak, for example, of how women are still considered perpetual minors in most societies; or how large numbers of women are still excluded from a direct relationship with property, with land, for instance, because they themselves are the property of men, or the property of their sons. That infantilization is part and parcel of the tools, the equipment that is used to keep us in this invisible cage. Black men who occupy the State and or feudal infrastructures of surveillance and resource management, deploy the same concept of time and incarceration over working class people, and particularly over women.

In southern Africa, he whole spatiality of colonial history and the crafting of coloniality has played out on the Black body. Black men colluded with white men, even as Black men were engaging in a form of mobility, which was about moving their labor out of the rural spaces into the centers of capitalist production and extraction. They colluded with whites in retaining the feudal infrastructures of control over women's mobility and the women's creativity. The reserves, for example, were not only a creation that was useful for white men to control Black labor and Black bodies. They were also useful for Black men in terms of enabling them to retain a sense of manhood. The idea of being a man was tied to the further enclosure and incarceration of Black women in those spaces. Listen to the lyrics of songs by Hugh Masekela and Caiphas Semenya - they always speak to that crisis of manhood that Black men experienced when they encountered the white man and his gun. They lament Black men being forced out of “the land of their fathers” and being forced into the mines and into the construction of railways and the harbors, to create the wealth and the power and the lifestyle that white people still enjoy in Southern Africa and in South Africa to this day. They talk about how they have a nostalgia for a time when they were men in an old, feudal sense. I was listening to Hugh Masekela’s song, ‘Stimela’ which is a truly beautiful musical experience. However, it’s very instructive in terms of understanding the mentality of Black men. He lists a hierarchy of priority that he’s nostalgic for. He talks about the cattle, his parents, his children, and then the wives. That's the nostalgia that Black men have even now for a past where they were men in feudal ways that are constructed as authentically African. That cultural authenticity is persistent because it serves an ideological function in keeping women separate, particularly women who live in distant parts of the society or on the periphery. So you can see how these neocolonial states and neocolonial elites deploy space and distance and mobility to perpetuate these imperial systems.

As feminists, therefore, living in these ancient landscapes, where human life sprang forth and took the first steps into this present moment, we must be able to understand the ways in which time, space, mobility, and entitlement were impacted by the encounter with colonization and now the reality of neo-coloniality – what is referred to as independence.

We have to return to history, not to romanticize it and praise Black men as great kings and as owners of cattle, land. children, and wives; but rather so that we can critically interrogate the traces and remaining narratives of what life was like, who women and men were, who all African humans were, regardless of their gendered identities, so that we can craft the new ideas and strategies for a different, inclusive, and sufficient future.

New feminist theorizing and scholarship must take up the urgency of becoming contemporary Africans, wherever we live – because we remain African regardless of how long we have been away from this continent.  Contemporarity grapples with the philosophical experiences of being in and of time; time as an experience of conflicting and astounding encounters, struggles and opportunities in this moment on our continent, and into the future.

We need a deeper, more unequivocal critique of Nationalism, so that we can remove ourselves from it and step into the new worlds that await us as beautiful human beings.

Bios:

T.D. Haper-Shipman is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Prior to Davidson, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa, was published in 2019 with Routledge Press. She has published in Third World Quarterly, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and International Studies Review. She has also published public-facing work in Pambazuka, The Global African Worker, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and Africa is a Country. During the 2023-2023 academic year, Harper-Shipman is a Fulbright Scholar in Senegal working on a project titled “Suturing Reproduction and the Nation: the politics of family planning in West Africa.”  

Patricia McFadden is a Radical Eco-feminist who aspires to a life of Freedom and Joy. She lives in Africa. She is vegan and produces most of her own organic food on a mountain in eastern Swaziland. She strives towards a balanced, respectful relationship with Nature as it encompasses all sentient beings, while searching for new feminist impetuses and insights from her eco-feminist lifestyle and activism. Some of her most recent publications are:  ‘Women’s Freedoms are the Heart Beat of Africa’s future: a Sankarian Imperative’ in A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara, Amber Murray (ed.) (London, Pluto Press: 2018); “A Feminist Conversation: Situating our Radical Ideas and Energies in the Contemporary African Context” (with Patricia Twasiima), in Feminist Dialogue Series (Mozambique: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2018);  “Critiquing Conventional Discourses on Girls and Gendered Female Identities in Africa,” OXFAM, 2018; “Contemporarity: sufficiency in a Radical African Feminist Life’” in the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 17(2) (2018); “The Nexus of Neo-liberalism and Precarity: Struggles for Alternative Societies” (2022) FES Mozambique; and forthcoming: ‘Subjectivity is the Critical Foundational Expression of Feminist Contemporarity’ in Feminist Formations, Special Issue on “Writing African Subjectivities” (2024).