At Researchers Without Borders (REWiB), we believe that learning is essential to strengthening our feminist analysis. Creating spaces for collective learning enables us to deepen our understanding of the world around us, question assumptions and analyze the structural drivers of inequality, and connect feminist theory to practice. Our monthly Knowledge Fireplace provides such a space by bringing staff and associates together to engage with a selected reading and explore its relevance to our work. Inspired by the African tradition of gathering around a fireplace to share knowledge, these conversations nurture critical thinking and strengthen our collective knowledge on specific themes. Following each session, we document our reflections in a blog to share our learning and contribute to African knowledge production.
In June, we reflected on gendered acts of citizenship and the postcolonial present from a reading of “If we stayed at home, nothing would change”
“Why does it take catastrophe for women to be taken seriously as political actors?”
This is one of the questions that animated a recent Knowledge Fireplace, with experiences from Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria as we discussed a 2023 article by Ayesha Khan and Katia Taela, “If we stayed at home, nothing would change: gendered acts of citizenship from Mozambique and Pakistan.” The paper traces two micro-protests that, on their surface, could not be more different. Hazara women in Quetta, Pakistan, refusing to bury their dead after a series of sectarian bombings, and women in a Maputo neighborhood blocking a highway after a six-year-old girl was killed by a speeding car, united in a shared refusal that silence had become more dangerous than the street.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles into your body when you have been surviving longer than you have been living. It is the exhaustion that one of our circle described when she talked about Zimbabwe.
“We can’t say we are managing, we’re surviving.”
It is the same exhaustion that drove Ana, a woman in Mozambique’s peri-urban Chiango neighborhood, to the road that had already claimed too many lives. And it is the exhaustion at the heart of a question our conversation kept returning to, turning over like a stone we weren’t sure we wanted to look beneath.
Our conversation did not stay in Pakistan or Mozambique. It could not. The world described in that paper, repressive, patriarchal, postcolonial, high-risk, is the world we live in. The first thing the paper forces you to confront is how little of what we call “our governments” we actually own. The postcolonial state produces marginal citizens based on multiple markers of identity rooted in imperial racial hierarchies and legacies of divide-and-rule colonialism. Colonization is the one that put women in the private sphere, and this should never be forgotten.
Before colonial contact, women in many African communities held formal economic and political power. They managed markets, collected taxes, and advised traditional leaders. Colonial administration systematically dismantled those structures, recruiting men into formal labor, taxing households through male heads, creating bureaucracies that legitimized only male authority. The curriculum followed. Home economics was designed to train women for the private sphere, not as an innocent domestic subject but as a colonial technology of confinement. Some of that curriculum remains intact today.
What replaced those structures was deliberately gendered, racially organized, and designed to produce a particular kind of citizen: masculine, urban, formally educated, religiously aligned with colonial structures. Everyone who does not fit that template, including poor women, ethnic minorities, the peri-urban, the rural, the religiously plural, is a citizen by paperwork and not by practice.
The Hazara women’s most powerful act of protest was itself religious. Refusing to bury the dead in defiance of Islamic requirements for immediate burial, transforming their graveyard into a site of public celebration and memorial, marking the dead as martyrs. They were not anti-religious, they were using what was available to them, from where they stood, to make claims that the State could not easily absorb or ignore. Our discussion connected this to Uganda’s women’s movement prayer vigils, where women gather at churches to pray for political prisoners, for peace, for human rights.
Perhaps no concept generated more sustained reflection than the politics of grief and how we can leverage it to demand our rights as citizens. But alongside this came a harder reckoning. In Uganda, mothers crying outside Parliament for disappeared or imprisoned sons have moved no one. A man whose wife had just died was denied bail by a judge to attend the funeral. An incarcerated opposition figure’s mother spent days weeping at the gate of Parliament.
The politics of grief, it turns out, is conditional. It works when the State retains some capacity for shame, some investment in the optics of legitimacy. When it does not, when the state has concluded that it can absorb any quantity of displayed suffering without political cost, grief is not a weapon. It is just grief, witnessed and disregarded. This makes it extremely painful and could lead to ill health or even death.
What our circle pressed on is the question of why women, specifically, must arrive at the threshold of catastrophic loss before they are recognized as political actors.
“Why does it have to take women to that point of grief, suffering, discrimination, marginalization, before they can say, no, we are ending it?”
The answer lies in the same colonial architecture that determined the value of women’s lives and systematically diminished the legitimacy of their claims. As a result, the threshold for those claims to be recognized has been set catastrophically high. Women are expected to endure suffering far beyond what any reasonable society would demand before the State deigns to acknowledge them or respond to their plight.
That, and the idea that politics happens somewhere else, in formal spaces, by formally credentialed people, which we vehemently refuse. Women become political subjects through everyday struggles, over food, water, roads, safety. These everyday responsibilities that are often seen as private are shaped by state power and inequality.
The Chiango protest is the clearest illustration of this. Ana did not go to the road as a political actor in any formal sense. She responded to the death of a child because the government failed to maintain the road in front of a school. The State’s failure to build a bridge was a political decision. The State failed to provide money in its budget, because this infrastructure was not a priority. Her protest was the point at which the private consequence of that political decision became a public demand.
The structure of women’s private confinement is self-reinforcing. The more the State fails to provide public services, the more labor falls to women in the private sphere, the less capacity they have to organize in the public sphere. The state’s neglect of infrastructure is, among other things, a mechanism of women’s political exclusion. If the government cannot provide healthcare, water, education, good roads, it means that within the private sphere, where the woman is playing the role of cooking, she has to go and fetch water. The State simply transfers the burden to women and girls and expands the amount of unpaid care and domestic work that women have to perform. This increases women’s time poverty and reduces the time and opportunities for them to participate in education, paid employment, leadership and political life mostly in the public sphere. Governments need to invest in infrastructure and social services to reduce unpaid care work and recognise care as essential to economic development and social wellbeing.
The conversation questioned current organising that requires formal institutions and funding. The reading portrayed women who acted when it was needed, no meeting, no proposal writing.
“Before, the people who were in that space at that point didn’t need to write a proposal to protest, or didn’t need to gather many resources to protest. Just pick your pots and saucepans, go banging them, and try to make a case. For that to happen, we have to sit down, write our proposals, and maybe apply to a fund. As you’re waiting for all the approval processes, that momentum will die.”
This led to the discussion on the NGO-ization of feminist activism, which in precise terms is the conversion of political action into a project cycle, with objectives, outputs, monitoring frameworks, and donor reporting requirements. The urgency of protest, its spontaneity, its emotional register, its roots in immediate crisis, is systematically incompatible with grant-funded timelines. By the time the proposal is approved and the funds disbursed, the moment has passed, and often the movement has fragmented.
What local organizing looks like when it works is what the Chiango women did before the institutional absence became visible. Door to door, face to face, a network of proximity, material support pooled from within the community, a shared clarity about what was unacceptable and what they were demanding. That organizing did not need a framework. In many protest contexts, women already know what silence costs them. What they need is solidarity. In this case, solidarity emerged from a common problem, from empathy for one of their own.
And so the work continues, in building the political consciousness, the collective infrastructure, and the feminist solidarity that makes it possible to act not only after catastrophe but before it. Not only in grief but in anticipation. Not only when the child has been killed, but when the road is being built without a pedestrian crossing and someone decides, in a government office somewhere, that Chiango does not merit the budget.
That decision is already political. The question is whether we are ready to respond to it at that moment and not two dead bodies later.
In conclusion, we challenged ourselves to act before harm, to project our feminist activism early enough to avoid harm, death or destruction. To speak early enough, to research early enough and to engage early enough to protect our communities from harm.
