From Nairobi to Now: Power, Praxis, and the Making of African Feminist Futures

Titilope F. Ajayi’s “From Nairobi to Now” is not a survey of women’s movements across Africa but a situated reflective essay. It moves from the political memory of the 1985 Nairobi women’s conference to everyday organizing, digital mobilization and intergenerational exchange. The essay asks where feminist practice takes place, who gets to name it, and whose labor sustains it. Its value is not that it defines a continent; it is that it reminds readers that movement history lives not only in conference records and institutional corridors, but also in care, memory, street-level action and the relationships through which information is carried.

Drawing on the author’s account of involvement with #BringBackOurGirls, the essay shows that the label “activist” does not always match how people understand their own work. People may organize vigils, preserve information about those who have disappeared and sustain one another without adopting a formal movement identity. That detail enlarges what counts as political labor. It is not only a speech on a stage or a post on a platform: documenting, accompanying and refusing to let information disappear can build public attention and collective responsibility. Digital networks connect people quickly, but visibility does not guarantee safety, resources or a redistribution of decision-making power.

Ajayi does not cast a “new generation” as the natural replacement for older movements. She considers professionalized and NGO-ised spaces, grassroots practice, online action and disagreements across generations about strategy and language. Friction can reveal where authority concentrates and whose knowledge is recognized; romanticizing it as effortless mutual learning can also hide real inequalities. More useful questions follow: who controls funding, media and agendas? Who bears the cost of care and continuity? Which local histories are obscured when transnational advocacy relies on universal language? The essay offers a way to examine these relationships, not an answer that can be applied unchanged to every country.

Read the essay alongside two different kinds of text: the African Feminist Charter, which states movement principles, and a UN Women policy brief on movement capacity. Their genres and sources of authority differ. A charter articulates commitments; an institutional report organizes policy concerns; Ajayi’s essay connects memory, practice and generational debate through reflection. Reading them together should not turn “African feminism” into a single voice. It lets us ask how different texts define problems, build knowledge and distribute the right to speak. The essay’s own limit matters: it is the author’s synthesis of a discussion and her practice, not a comparative study representing an entire continent.

Original and related reading

• Titilope F. Ajayi’s original essay
• Further reading: the African Feminist Charter and The Status of the Women’s Movement in Africa. These are respectively a movement text and an institutional policy brief, not substitutes for Ajayi’s essay.