The Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists

Adopted at the first African Feminist Forum in Accra in 2006, the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists is a movement document: a statement of shared commitments and a prompt for collective accountability. The forum brought together more than one hundred feminist activists from Africa and its diaspora. The Charter is not a survey of every woman’s experience, a law, or proof that its principles have been realized. It describes itself as aspirational, then asks what it would take for feminist organizing to live up to that aspiration.

Naming a politics without claiming one identity

The Charter treats the act of naming oneself a feminist as political. It counters the claim that feminism is foreign to Africa by locating feminist thought and organizing in African women’s own histories and struggles. This is not an argument that there is one authentic African feminism. Its account of identity is deliberately plural: histories differ across places and generations, and no single label can make those differences disappear. A shared name makes collective analysis and action possible; it does not certify who belongs.

That distinction matters. A continental political frame can connect struggles that are often separated, but it can also flatten local histories if treated as a description of a homogeneous population. The Charter’s insistence on varied identities should constrain how its “we” is used. Solidarity is a political practice among differently situated people, not evidence that they experience power in the same way.

Patriarchy as a system—and a material relation

Rather than defining patriarchy as individual prejudice alone, the Charter traces it through political, economic, legal, social, cultural, religious and military arrangements. It places gendered power in relation to class, race, ethnicity, religion and imperial histories. This structural account changes the question from “Which person holds a sexist belief?” to “Which rules, resources and institutions repeatedly make some people governable, dependent or unheard?”

The answer is not confined to public office or formal law. The Charter pairs bodily autonomy—including reproductive choice, abortion, sexuality and freedom from violence—with healthcare, education, water, sanitation, sustainable livelihoods and social welfare. That pairing resists two reductions: treating bodily freedom as a private issue detached from material life, and treating economic provision as sufficient while leaving control over bodies untouched. Rights become meaningful through the conditions and decision-making power that let people exercise them.

The movement must answer to its own principles

One of the Charter’s most consequential moves is to carry its politics inside feminist organizations. Its sections on individual and institutional ethics ask not only what activists demand from states and society, but how movements distribute labor, money, authority and voice. Transparency, accountability, fair working conditions, maternity protections, responsible financial practice and credible ways to address conflict are not administrative extras. They shape who can participate, whose work is recognized and who bears the cost of sustaining a movement.

The leadership section extends that argument across generations. It values integrity and movement legitimacy over representation as a numerical target; it calls for mentoring without paternalism, sharing power, and crediting women’s intellectual and organizing labor. Peer learning and review matter because accountability cannot be reduced to a statement of values: people need practices through which they can question decisions, learn from disagreement and repair harm.

This makes the Charter more than a catalogue of demands. It links public opposition to domination with an internal test: do an organization’s everyday arrangements reproduce the hierarchy it names outside? The Charter offers principles and proposed mechanisms, not evidence that every organization adopted them. Formal procedures do not automatically make a space just; accountability can become paperwork unless people affected by decisions have real access to information, authority and remedy.

An invitation, not a final map

The Charter’s breadth is both its strength and a question it leaves open. Shared principles can build coalitions across issues and borders; a continental banner can also conceal differences of nationality, class, disability, religion, sexuality and political context. The text does not resolve every tension between common commitments and local autonomy. Its plural account of identity instead asks readers to keep that tension visible rather than treating unity as sameness.

The Charter’s aspirational form is important. It proposes circulation, translation, discussion, organizational self-monitoring and peer review as ways to keep principles in use. The African Women’s Development Fund’s account of the Charter’s translation work describes translation as collaborative movement practice that can carry political ideas across linguistic communities. Yet dissemination alone cannot guarantee access or shared authority; those depend on who participates and how decisions are made.

Read today, the Charter is most useful not as a timeless checklist or a single definition of African feminism, but as a situated invitation to examine the relationships among bodily freedom, material conditions, historical agency and movement governance. Its enduring challenge is practical: can feminist organizations make their distribution of care, labor, resources and power answerable to the liberation they advocate?

Sources and further reading

• The Charter text and the African Feminist Forum resource page.
• The African Women’s Development Fund on translating the African Feminist Charter.
• For a different genre and argument, compare FemRes’s African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa and “Nego-Feminism”. These are editorial reading paths, not works the Charter cites.

How do these principles enter organizational practice? Read Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi’s Birthing a Continental Feminist Movement alongside the Charter: her participant account of organizing in Zanzibar in 2005 and Accra in 2006 gives concrete context for its demands around power and accountability. A participant’s memory offers a route into that history, rather than a single voice for the whole movement.