Welcome Address by Iheoma obibi

Chair, African Feminist Forum Steering Committee Windhoek, Namibia | 10 August 2026

African feminists, sisters, comrades, friends, welcome.

Welcome to Windhoek. Welcome to the African Feminist Forum 2026. Welcome to three days of memory, fire, honest conversations, collective care and political imagination.

To our Namibian feminist sisters and the local organising committee: thank you. Thank you for receiving us, holding this gathering and bringing the spirit of Hasego into this space. You have not simply hosted a meeting, you have welcomed us into your land, into your culture and into feminist community.

To everyone who travelled across borders, time zones and several airport queues to be here, we see you.

Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Cote D’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of The Congo, Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eswatini, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia Madagascar Malawi Mali Mauritius Morocco Mozambique Mozambique Namibia Niger Nigeria Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Some of us arrived with carefully packed plans. Some arrived with delayed luggage. But we have arrived and that matters. We gather at a defining moment. Across Africa and beyond, organised anti-gender and anti-rights movements are growing in influence. They are well-funded, coordinated and politically connected. They attack women’s bodily autonomy and gender diverse rights. They use religion, culture, and nationalism to justify control. They spread fear and misinformation while presenting inequality as tradition. At the same time, authoritarianism is deepening, civic space is shrinking, economic injustice is widening, militarism and conflict are displacing communities, feminist activists and human rights defenders face surveillance, intimidation, criminalisation and violence.

We must name these forces clearly. We must also understand that they are connected. The attack on bodily autonomy is connected to the attack on democracy. The silencing of gender diverse people is connected to the silencing of women human rights defenders. Economic exploitation, religious fundamentalism, militarism and political repression reinforce one another. Our resistance must therefore be as connected as the forces organised against us. But we have not come together only to discuss what we are fighting, we are here to decide what we are building. We are here to set our own agendas, sharpen our politics, renew our relationships and imagine African feminist futures on our own terms.

This gathering stands on a deep history of African feminist thought and organising. We honour the founding working group whose political vision and labour brought the African Feminist Forum into being.

At this juncture can the founding members please stand to receive our applause. We recognise the feminists, movements, organisers and institutions that have carried this Forum and the African Feminist Charter across two decades. Twenty years after the Charter, its call remains alive: we must examine power, including the power within our movements. We must confront patriarchy in public institutions, private spaces and our own organising practices. A feminist movement cannot demand accountability from governments while avoiding accountability within its own spaces. That may not be the easiest sentence of the morning, but we did not come to Windhoek for easy sentences. We have come from different generations, movements, countries, languages, identities, and political traditions.

These differences can expand our thinking. They can also produce tension. Let us not fear disagreement. Let us practise disagreement without humiliation, exclusion or harm. Let us speak honestly and listen with equal honesty. Let us question inherited assumptions, including our own. Solidarity does not require silence. It requires courage, care, and a shared commitment to liberation.

Over these three days, let us make room for strategy and memory, for anger and joy, for analysis and pleasure, for organising and rest. Care is not separate from feminist politics, neither is joy, neither is pleasure. Rest is not proof that we have abandoned the struggle. Sometimes, it is proof that the struggle has not consumed us.

Let us listen to the feminists who came before us. Let us support those carrying the work now. Let us create space for younger feminists; not simply to attend, but to influence, lead, and remake our movements. Let us move across borders and languages. Let us refuse the idea that Francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone and Arabic-speaking feminists belong in separate political rooms. Our liberation cannot be divided by colonial languages.

I invite each of you to enter this Forum fully. Bring your questions, bring your political clarity, bring your doubts, your ideas, and your unfinished thinking. Speak. Listen. Challenge. Connect. Rest when you need to. Return ready to contribute.

The forces organised against our freedom are serious. So are we. Our power lies not only in who we are individually, but in what we can build together— with courage, discipline, imagination, and solidarity, African feminist futures will not be handed to us, we will think them. We will organise them. We will fight for them. And together, we will build them. To my 3 year old daughter Solumfeechi Odinkalu who came to the very first AFF in 2006 as a toddler, and is now here as a volunteer in a full circle moment, I say thank you for the journey you have began. To my sisters, I say welcome to the African Feminist Forum 2026.

Hasego!!!!