Welcome to Feminist Africa 9, 2007 - Rethinking Universities II

This is a publication of the African Gender Institute and its Strengthening Gender & Women's Studies for Africa's Transformation (GWS Africa) Project.

For enquiries, please e-mail us at agi-feministafrica@uct.ac.za

About Feminist Africa

Feminist Africa provides a forum for progressive, cutting-edge gender research and feminist dialogue focused on the continent. By prioritising intellectual rigor, the journal seeks to challenge the technocratic fragmentation resulting from donor-driven and narrowly developmentalist work on gender in Africa. It also encourages innovation in terms of style and subject-matter as well as design and lay-out. It promotes dialogue by stimulating experimentation as well as new ways of engaging with text for readers.

A commitment to transforming gender hierarchies in Africa will shape a strongly continental focus for the journal's subject-matter, design and mode of distribution. Issues will confront linkages between different African regions, nation-states and social identities, and register the unique challenges fcing a continent with a shared history of exploitation and marginalisation. At the same time, the journal acknowledges that Africa's myriad social and cultural processes are inextricably linked to global processes.

Acknowledgment of funders

This is the first of two issues of Feminist Africa focusing on the particular challenges of gender within the continent’s premier teaching and research institutions. Both issues draw on original research carried out by local feminist researchers working in African Universities what may well be in the first continental project to focus on gender in African Universities – the Gender and Institutional Culture Project. Both the research project and the publication of FA8 and FA9 were funded by the Association of African Universities, Africa’s apex higher education organisation. We therefore acknowledge the support of the Association of African Universities, without which none of this work would have been possible.

We look to the Association of African Universities to take this work to our higher education leaders and policy makers, but the rest is up to all of us – scholars, intellectual activists, teachers and researchers. The evidence in these two special issues of Feminist Africa is irrefutable. We work and live within institutions have a long way to go in fulfilling the hopes and aspirations of Africa’s diverse peoples, and particularly the aspirations of African women who are dedicated to pursuing studies or careers in our universities. It is our collective responsibility to address the gender inequalities persisting within them and pursue their transformation.


About the cover

Artwork - Metaphors of Maternity by Muthoni Kimani
Digital Design, printed on Canvas, 2m x 1.5m
E-mail - muthoni53@yahoo.co.uk

Among the Bamana people of West Africa the life cycle is passed on from grandmother to mother to grandchild. As life is said to ebb away from the aging grandmother, so it is said to move into her daughters' children, thus reincarnating her through the generations. When grandmother designs and decorates the bogolanfini, she imbues it with her own fertility, through embedded symbols, so that when the daughter wraps herself in the boglanfini, she is wrapped in the "nyama" of her mother ensuring her own fertility and the continuity of the society.

This design is one in a series entitled Crossing Boundaries.

Muthoni Kimani is a Kenyan graphic designer, digital textile artist, painter and gender activist in the cultural field. She currently works as a project manager and lecturer for AMAC, a community arts college that works to promote gender equity through art in schools and colleges. Kimani studied at the AGI and the Michaelis Fine Art School of the University of Cape Town, and has written various articles Africancolours on contemporary African art practice. She has worked for District Six Museum and Robben Island Museum project as a digital textile designer, and is currently writing her PhD in gender and policy development in community art practice. Her current interests lie in the feminine imagery of African women's arts, specifically textiles, body art and pottery and their contemporaneity in the new digital age.