Help Ama Decolonise Feminism in SA

Hello everyone, 


So this is something I find hard and strange, I don't like asking for money, especially from the friends, family, collaborators and inspirations who already give me so much support in so many ways. However, I have been invited to Wits University in Johannesburg to present a paper I wrote on climate change on the continent of Africa and why it's a feminist conversation at the Decolonising Feminism Conference this August and the only way I can go is with your help. 


The conference states its mission as considering:

'The entanglements of feminism with colonialism and anti- colonialism...The theorizations of particularly white Western women have often obscured the struggles of all women, in addition to those who are queer, transgendered, or disabled.' It is also an 'African-feminist' as opposed to 'diaspora-feminist' centred conference, which I think is both extremely important and inspiring.

The re-centering of black and queer feminist narratives at the heart of black and queer activists, both in the diaspora and on the African continent, has been the study of my literary and arts practices across performance art, fiction and other mediums for several years. I believe attending the Wits conference will be an invaluable opportunity to connect with other African feminists, to have my politics pushed, queried and challenged and to make cross-continental connections with whom to catalyse art, activism and change. 

The paper I am presenting is a passionate and to my mind fairly radical challenge to the European mindset of complacency when it comes to the legacies of European colonialism and its very tangible contemporary effects on the continent due to climate change. In other words the carbon that we are emitting in Europe now, which is directly endangering the livelihoods and lives of people across Africa cannot be considered outside of understanding colonialism. Black and brown bodies across the global south are at much greater threat to the affects of climate change than those in the global North - particularly Europe and North America, and that is not a coincidence. Centering around the conversation of reproduction and staring the frankly terrifying statistics that face us for the future,  I discuss why this is essentially a decolonial conversation feminists need to be having, African feminists first. 

This GoFundMe campaign will enable me to fly to Johannesburg, to stay for ten days, during which time I can connect with other feminists, climate activists and radical artists such as Zanele Muholi, Milisuthando Bongela and hopefully someone from the CSIR research for climate studies.The funding will also cover basic expenses and possibly support me in gathering interviews for a documentation project. 


The funds will be used as such:

£500 - flight London to Johannesburg (Thank you Aunty B for donating airmiles that subsidise this flight!)

£150 - Accommodation (Thank you Judy and Simon for helping me find friends of friends to stay with for part of the trip!)

£350 - To cover food, travel expenses over 10 days, the conference fee, and any injections required for the trip.


Here's some more information on my paper and why this trip isn't just about advancing academia rather than actually helping anybody. 

Like most people who have moved between the arts, activism and academia, I am wary of becoming a "radical professor" - I want my writing and my work to be widely disseminated, to be complex yet accessible and more than anything to be useful to the people directly being oppressed by the power structures I am critiquing. Feminists not just scientists need to be at the forefront of the Climate Change conversation, not just as the presumed eco-activists who hug trees and throw flowers, who recieve eye-rolls from fellow campaigners, but as those dealing with some of the hardest and most overwhelming human and planetary rights violations and abuses. 

82 million people across the African continent are predicted to dies from the affects of climate change by 2100. Thats over 976,000 a year. That's on the scale of a genocide. A genocide of black and brown bodies. And yes the corporations need to step up, and yes there's lots of damage that is irreversible, and yes recycling your tuna cans isn't enough but there are a lot of conversations we can be having on an individual level. And not only is it our responsibility to have these conversations, it is our right, our right to decide what kind of humanity, humans will be remembered for, when our time on this planet is done, and whether any brown bodies will be left to witness that end. 


I plan for this presentation to be published and made publicly available online, as well as hopefully being filmed so as to become a part of the justification for a far more radical, far more uncomfortable conversation about Europe's role in paying out for climate change. This is essential not only because of the economic and culturally destructive legacies of colonialism, but because of the very current acts of climate colonialism still going on today.

Please give anything at all that you can, and you if you can't then please do share the campaign, I only have 30 days to make it happen, and I wouldn't asked if I didn't really believe in it, and I do. 


Thanks just for reading this (I know it was long) and for carrying on despite everything the world is throwing at you today, trying to tell you that you can't.