The Dynamics of Birthing a Continental Feminist Movement: From Zanzibar to Accra

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi’s essay tells movement history as difficult collective labour rather than a smooth story of progress. Writing from her position inside the organizing process, she revisits the conflicts at a 2005 gathering in Zanzibar, the work of rebuilding afterward, and the first African Feminist Forum in Accra in 2006, where the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Women was adopted. The essay’s value is not that it supplies a finished portrait of a continental movement. It records how a political space was reconstructed after its original vision had been tested.

The author rejects the claim that there is no women’s movement in Africa while also resisting the idea that “the African women’s movement” is one organization or one settled position. Trade unions, community networks, faith-based groups, professional associations, advocacy organizations, and transnational coalitions have all contributed to collective work on different issues. This plural account makes an important distinction: continental solidarity is not a naturally unified whole but a political undertaking that must be negotiated. Movements can connect across places and agendas without assuming that everyone faces the same relations of patriarchy or agrees on what feminism requires.

The Zanzibar meeting’s breakdown is among the essay’s most analytically useful episodes. Participants arrived expecting respect, safety, shared experience, and solidarity; those expectations did not become reality simply because the gathering was called feminist. Conflict involved generational, ideological, and identity-based tensions as well as interpersonal conduct and organizational design. Adeleye-Fayemi cautions against confusing substantive political disagreement with personality clashes, and against using the language of sisterhood to evade hard questions. The meeting did continue and achieved some planning goals, but its fractures forced organizers to ask what shared rules, accountability, and conflict processes a space for different positions would actually need.

The Charter adopted in Accra was therefore more than a statement of ideals: it was also an attempt to establish conditions for renewed collaboration. Adeleye-Fayemi treats institutionalization as both a practical necessity and a source of risk. As work grows, fundraising, coordination, documentation, governance, and sustained care require labour. Refusing all formal structures does not make power disappear; it can leave power less visible. Yet institutions can also harden hierarchy, appropriate agendas, or allow professional administration to outrank movement values. The question is not whether organization is inherently good or bad, but how structures remain answerable to their principles and participants. Read alongside FemRes’s Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists, this essay shows how public commitments emerged from organizational trouble, while the Charter makes those commitments legible as a political framework.

This is a retrospective by a central participant, not a neutral meeting record, and it cannot stand in for other participants’ accounts. Its insider position yields organizational detail while also making it a form of situated memory and self-critique. Nor does the essay claim that Accra resolved African feminist disagreements; the author notes that some tensions persist. Its lasting contribution is to shift solidarity away from presumed sameness and toward practice: how people with different positions can build spaces that hold dissent, take responsibility when harm occurs, and continue working together. For readers seeking an entry into African feminisms, the essay offers a history while insisting that organizing labour itself belongs within feminist theory.

Source. Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, “The Dynamics of Birthing a Continental Feminist Movement: From Zanzibar to Accra,” Feminist Africa 7(1). The journal page provides the full article and download.