Special Issue: Oppressions are interlinked in Africa - Can intersectionality be a political tool to inspire social justice organising?

Why has mobilisation for the social justice in Africa assumed that social problems are discrete challenges only facing specific groups? NGO-organising is increasingly failing to acknowledge how the interlocking factors and systems of oppression have continuously worked together to produce domination, discrimination and marginalisation in Africa. Indeed as many commentators would agree all Africa’s so hyped ‘advancement’ has been founded on pyramids of oppression. In addition, various forms of oppression overlap rather than ran parallel in the lives of affected people. Embedded in colonial histories and exacerbated by modern fundamentalist ideologies, the neo-liberal policies and processes in Africa have advanced further oppression and discrimination against already disenfranchised groups.

Many social justice organisers have often fallen into the trap of defining struggles as exclusively caused by definite categories of causes. This single axis analysis has resulted in silo-oriented strategies in organising and resource mobilisation for social change in the continent.

Conventional interventions to oppression in Africa have failed to capture the interactive effects of the different oppressions on different constituents and ended up marginalising them even more.

Indeed different forms of oppressions in Africa are interlinked and cannot be confronted alone. At such a time when there is a lot of reawakening among the citizenry in Africa to demand for more than just political rights and freedoms, traditional struggles against torture, violence against women, exploitation of workers, environmental degradation among others are meeting up with ‘newer issues’ in social justice. New social movements or identity organising have been seen as competitors for resources and constituencies.

But this situation should accelerate the need for social movements and other grassroots formations to apply new prisms to analyse social struggles in Africa. This should be a departure from the conventional organising that assumes that perceived groups or communities have similar experiences with social problems.

An intersectional theory and analysis in Africa can reveal the multiple identities that define people, exposing the different types of discrimination and disadvantages that occur as a result of the combination of these identities. This should inspire our activism towards inclusive organising and greater collaboration between and across social movements in challenging powerful and oppressive systems in Africa.

In view of this there is need for organisers to ask critical questions such as:

• Have we been lied to about the REAL cause of Africa’s oppression?
• In what way have the different social, political and economic systems affected specific groups already oppressed?
• Do African States function mainly in the interests of its people or do they maintain or actively support other structures that propagate their oppression?
• What is the role of the mainstream media in shaping a biased view of oppressed people in Africa?
• Are neo-liberal policies and processes reducing or advancing the different factors that lead to oppression in Africa?
• Why is it difficult for social justice movements to unpack the different layers of oppression that work together to produce injustices in Africa?
• Are social movements in Africa fully theorising their struggles to counter oppression?
• What can we learn from the feminist movement in analysing the multifaceted dimensions of oppressions?
• Can intersectionality be the unifying glue to the new forms of organising in Africa?

Pambazuka News Editorial Team invites articles on these and related questions for a special issue on Oppressions in Africa planned for February 2014.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES is: Friday February 14

LENGTH OF ARTICLES: Articles should be written in Microsoft Word, Font: Times, size 12 and be between 1000-3000 words

Please submit a biography of two lines at the end of your article and send it to:[email protected]