As part of AWID member profile stories, Ngozi Cole tells about her journey and how she found her identity as a feminist.

My earliest joyful memories were being on my mother’s back. The cozy warmth of her cotton wrapper was comforting.

Up until I was five years old I would always jump on her back so that she would patiently wrap me up into a cocoon, even when she would mumble that I was getting “too big” for that. Around that time, our lives changed forever. In 1997, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels invaded Freetown, and home as I knew it was ripped away from me. 

My mother fled with me and my older sister to neighboring The Gambia, where we would start life as refugees. I was only five when we fled and had little understanding of why I had to leave behind my friends, cousins, father, and toys. I tried to adapt to a new home and my mother made sure her daughters were shielded from the many realities of marginalization and hardship that come with being a refugee in a foreign country. I learned how to speak wolof, made friends quickly and soon many things became familiar - smells and sounds started to feel like they could be my piece of home.  

The following year we moved back to Sierra Leone after a brief respite of peace, and it seemed as though peace had finally come, even though it was a shaky stillness. We tried to settle into our old life again, hoping that a peace agreement between warring factions would work out. Life seemed stable for a while and for a moment I started to forget my life in The Gambia - until January 6th, 1999 when the rebels re-entered Freetown. 

To become unsettled again, to face the trauma of war again, was much worse than the last time I experienced it. This time I was more aware and slightly older, and it left a feeling of trying to catch something that was floating away from me. We fled to The Gambia again, and for two more years there it seemed like I had found home, and settled into my identity as a refugee, or as an “alien”, as we were called in The Gambia. 

In 2002, we decided to return to Sierra Leone again, for good this time, we hoped.  

My identity shifted again when I started high school in Freetown at the Annie Walsh Memorial School. I didn’t know my own national anthem, I had forgotten some of the words in the national pledge, and I knew that my accent wasn’t “quite right”. In the first grade of high school, some of my classmates asked if I was really Sierra Leonean. Even though the security of home and the familiar had been snatched, dangled in front of me, only to be snatched away from me again, I was desperate to lose that feeling of displacement, of feeling less than, not a full citizen, a refugee.

After formal high school in Sierra Leone I won a scholarship to attend a pan African school -The African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg. Afterwards, I went on to Wooster, a small town in the middle of Ohio, to attend the College of Wooster, a small private liberal Arts School not too far from Cleveland. I took some classes in philosophy and political science which, along with the academia, gave me the tools to articulate another part of myself - my identity as a feminist. 

During my early teenage years, I had been fully convinced feminists were women who harbored anger toward men, man-haters.

At around 16, I had started thinking very radically about my position as a young girl, in what I considered (and still do) a predominantly patriarchal society. I was inspired by women’s rights activists, women who constantly fought for political equality in Sierra Leone, equal economic and property rights, and rallied against female genital mutilation. But I still considered “feminism” too extreme. In 2013, I got the chance to be part of a fellowship in Ghana, of young African women living on the continent and in the diaspora, many of them feminists, who were making a change in their respective communities. 

During my time in Ghana, I met Leymah Gbowee and Taiye Selasi, brave women who had also battled with identity, and solidly identified with feminism. Upon my return to the United States that summer, I started to blog about my journey as an African woman living in the mid-west, and also about my fully embracing feminism. I was able to find a voice for myself, a voice that was no longer shy to debate and argue with my peers about issues affecting women, both on campus and the outside world. Feminism influenced my writings, and I was featured on an African women’s podcast to talk about the stifling of African women’s sexuality. My blog posts on body shaming and rape culture and shame were widely shared on social media.  

Even after college I continued to find ways to embrace this part of myself, and as I am growing and fully embracing it, I know now that feminism isn’t a “part” of me, it is fundamental to my survival as I navigate life’s journey as a young Sierra Leonean woman. These days I find outlets to write about women’s rights concerning mental health and reproductive rights in Sierra Leone.

We are searching for a post-extractivist, eco-feminist development alternative

The women of the Somkhele and Fuleni communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa have taken matters into their own hands. As primary caregivers and livelihood creators, women have been impacted the most and worst by the water crisis that is a combination of drought and heavy coal mining not far away from their homes.

“The first thing that disturbed us about the mine is, where it’s built, where they are extracting coal and where they have built their offices. That’s where we used to live. That’s where we farmed and that’s where we drew our water. They arrived and blocked our rivers, so now we can’t fetch water. Right now we don’t have water anywhere, we buy water.”

– Smangele Nkosi from Somkhele, featured in “No Good Comes from the Mine”, a documentary by WoMin

With the involvement and support of WoMin, an African gender and extractives alliance, women from these two communities have been collectively strengthening their organising and resistance against coal mining and, specifically the Tendele mine. 

According to WoMin, this kind of local organising by community-based working class and peasant women should be on the agenda of the 61^st session of the Committee on the Status of Women, currently taking place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. It is imperative to “building an analysis of what women’s empowerment in the changing world of work should look like” as well as having a clear and sharp assessment of the current contexts, so that our movements’ work has a stronger influence.

Gendered Impact

“Extractivism’s impacts on women’s bodies, sexuality and autonomy cannot be underestimated… Extractive industries have a huge impact on land and water – the communal resources women use to sustain the livelihoods of their families and communities. “

WoMin explains that “because of inequality and gendered divisions of labor” women take on a social reproduction role (unpaid labor) within the African working class communities and among peasant women.  As such, they are heavily affected by extractive industries.

The alliance also highlights that regional policy analysis has firmly neglected the gendered impact of extractive industries, specifically the link between mining, extractivism and violence against women.

This violence manifests itself in different ways, for example through conflict as corporates and States employ divide and rule tactics to force community decisions in favour of extraction. Land dispossession that forces communities off their lands to make way for extractive interests and then left with scarce resources to support their lives and livelihoods. This means there is need for development alternatives that address high levels of interpersonal violence against women in families, communities and draw the links to state and corporate-sponsored violence that take place in areas where extractives industries. Another major impact of mineral-based industrialisation is climate change, causing drought and water scarcity, which also negatively impacts agricultural production. And because of the gendered divisions of labor division and women’s reproductive role, they experience disproportionate negative impact.

“It often seems, from women’s perspectives and that of communities, that the costs of mineral and oil extraction outweigh the benefits, principally enjoyed by the local and ruling elite, corporates and investors.” 

Relevant and Urgent - Women must lead and define the change and alternatives

WoMin’s work is both extremely relevant and urgent in the current global context. The alliance not only focuses on exposing the negative impacts mining has on women, but they also work to provide eco-feminist and post-extractivist development alternatives.

“The current development paradigm is not designed to take into account the voice of women, let alone communities most directly affected by minerals-based industrialisation and other extractives industries (including corporate agriculture).”

Women that organise locally, and are part of grassroots movements “must lead and define the change and alternatives.” Working with national and local organisations, communities, and movements in countries including South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Nigeria, this is an extremely important component in WoMin’s work. Even though the communities in these countries deal with diverse forms of extractive industries, “they each tell a similar story of corporate impunity alongside state collusion that is constantly violating the rights to lives and livelihoods of communities and women.”

Resistance and resilience

In order to develop resilient and effective local organising, create strategies for the ‘now’, and strengthen analysis to inform a long-term transition to a post-extractivist society, WoMin strives to craft national and regional campaigns and projects.

The Women Building Power booklets provide practical solutions to energy issues affecting communities so they can sustain themselves, while also organising for wider changes, including climate justice. The seven ‘how-to’ booklets are research, information and tool all in one.

It is also a pre-cursor to the upcoming African women-led regional campaign on Energy, Fossil Fuels and Climate Justice. “The campaign aims to build a women’s movement to make deep change in the way energy is produced and distributed in our countries and in Africa more widely.”

To showcase the powerful resistance of Somkhele and Fuleni women and of women in communities in Uganda and potentially Niger or DRC, WoMin is working on “No Good Comes from the Mine” a character-driven Pan-African documentary.

“It tells the story of women whose lives are being negatively affected by mining and other forms of extractives. It also tells the story of their struggle to protect and reclaim their land, their livelihoods, their bodies and their lives. The film shows their day to day realities and how they are mobilising to resist and protest the injustices…”

Watch the documentary trailer: