The African Gender Institute is excited to fill a new post for an Associate Professor or Professor who will be part of our new African Feminist Studies department to be launched next year. Recently renamed to capture the particular intellectual and imaginative roots and strengths at work, the Department of African Feminist Studies remains one in strong collegiality with continental and national partners.

As a team of researchers, writers, teachers, and activists located within the Humanities Faculty at UCT, we are deeply disappointed by the calibre of the information, assumptions, and ideas profiled by the talk.

We are  simultaneously outraged by the way the talk positioned those living counter-heteronormatively as a “they,” to be reduced to an explanation via medical engagement with only our genitals. We associate this approach with colonial anthropologies and although a concentration on ‘othering’ people via their bodies may indeed be part of the thinking of Prof. Phakeng and Dr Mathabe’s, we ourselves have answered the call to thoroughly decolonize any epistemological, or strategic, knowledge-making around questions of gender, sex, and sexuality. We do not expect to find that at the most senior level of the university, our own work is being undone, our students, co-workers, and partners damaged/attacked and gravely violated in public space.

We have also written to Prof. Phakeng to ask for a conversation about her approach and await a response.

The play reading of COVID WAARHEID / COVID’S TRUTH available online

The play written, and performed, by the SW Theatre SA at the Theatre Arts in Observatory from 10&11th September at 7pm, 12 September both at 3pm and 7pm is now available online.

Feminist Africa, Volume 2, Issue 1 (2021): Extractivism, Resistance, Alternatives is the latest edition of journal. Edited by Charmaine Pereira and Dzodzi Tsikata, this issue marks the successful transition of the journal from its birthplace, the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, across the continent to the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Accra.

Nomusa Makhubu is Associate Professor in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Cape Town. She is the new Chair of the AGI’s Advisory Board.