I first discuss what being a feminist means to me and the dreams and visions I had prior to becoming a parent as a young woman who wanted to have it all. I will then focus on what my daughter’s arrival has meant and what has changed or been challenged. Finally, I share my experience about the dilemmas and compromises of (r)evolutionary love, dealing with grief and the healing and life-transforming potential of telling and sharing our diverse narratives of feminist parenting and re-creating solidarities that were eroded by conjugated patriarchies. I use an intersectional approach as per Crenshaw’s use of the term: “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated” (40). This allows me to focus both on my intersecting vulnerabilities and my intersectional privilege (Cho et al).

I Did Not Have to Decide to Become a Feminist: Life Happened

I have not always wanted to be somebody’s wife or life partner. Or a mother. I was born and raised in Senegal in a family of five girls, and one boy, who was also the last child. My parents kept trying for a boy until he was born. In a society valuing boys over girls, no wonder my parents chose the name “Amine” for him: a prayer answered in Arabic. My sisters and I were very close friends. This is where my first ideas of sorority and solidarity were forged as well as the belief that we shared a common life experience.

In addition, all my education—primary and secondary—was spent in all-girls schools. My family is not rich, but we have never lacked anything. I was quite a tomboy; I practiced karate, football, and other physical sports, such as “au-drapeau” in the streets with my friends (like in the picture below—you do not need to know where I am: I am all of them).

I played sports until my mother decided it was time for my older sister and me to start learning how to cook and take care of a house—to learn to be wife material. We were in secondary school then. Fortunately, my little sister was allowed to pursue karate classes, and she even ended up with a black belt. As for my brother, he never experienced any such restrictions or preoccupations; he did not experience curfew as we did, his male privilege protected him from that.

As for me, though very calm and reserved, I remember at around ten years old having a tough fight with an older male childhood friend because he had said “girls are stupid.” I calmly waited until we arrived in a quiet street under construction and full of tar, and then politely asked him, “Can you please repeat what you said earlier.” He did. I fought him and sat on him telling him, “Next time, think twice before saying stupid things,” and I covered his face with tar. Other than my early feminism and quarrelsome nature, I was a shy bookworm who loved writing short stories and poems in her mathematics book for the entire class to read. I also wore a veil for three years, not only for religious reasons but also as a way of protecting my new femininity and learning to deal with it, after past experiences of abuse.

I left Senegal at the age of eighteen to pursue higher education in France. Being far away from my sisters, as well as being the only member of my family to be abroad, came with a dose of responsibilities and duties; my parents did not spare any occasion to remind me that I am from a “very honourable” family and that I should keep behaving in a way that would not bring shame to them. During my third year of study, I learned that my father had married a second wife. For him, Islam allowed him to marry up to four wives. My mother accepted this because of i) religion, ii) love, and iii) culture. I did not take it well, hence family ‘mediation’. After all, the self-nominated mediators asked, who was I to want to be consulted on an issue that was only the business of my two parents? Faced with so many mixed feelings and above all rage, uncontrollable rage, I would write long letters to my mother and other long letters expressing my hate of the double standards of the hypocritical society in which we were raised—one that only knew how to make women seem small. I decided to contribute in an anthology on polygamy, which gave voice to people living in a polygamist household and who most of the time did not make the decision to live that life. I convinced my mother to write a piece, too. I think it helped us both to move ahead, with our scars. Writing became a way for me to take care of myself and of my feelings. To talk back. I did not know Audre Lorde then. But I was echoing what she once said: “what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal, and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood” (Lorde).

Up to that moment, I viewed my father as a feminist. He empowered us, his daughters and his boy, constantly. He invested in our education and encouraged all our creative passions. I have now made peace with the fact that his polygamy was his choice of life and have learned not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. My father was still loving and caring; he still inspires me on many other levels. But these family experiences created a deeper consciousness of my gender and influenced the choices I would make immediately after. Change city. Change university. Find a job. Be financially autonomous. Write a novel. Have it published. Change my course of studies. Focus on my studies. Make my own decisions. Own them. I started reading the works of African feminists and the work of other African women writers. I also started writing more and more and was glad to find out I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

(Not) Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth2

After finishing my studies, I returned to Senegal to work there despite starting a relationship with my now husband. It mattered to me that I work in my own area of specialization after so many years of studies, and it mattered to him to resume his studies. Then my older sister got married, followed by my younger sister. My now husband and I were still dating. I became the focus of my entourage and especially that of my mother. I was still living at home at that age, not only because most unmarried women did but because I wanted to spend time with my family after so many years abroad. For many years, I kept teasing my mother: “you and I will stay in the house after you marry everyone else away.” Every day was about resisting her sarcastic comments: “menopause is not far away you know” or “a job is not a husband.”

My mother’s comments were based on a culture according to which “taaru jigeen sëy la,” or “the beauty of a woman lies in marriage.” This widespread belief makes it so difficult for single women, whereas single men are not subjugated to any form of pressure or social surveillance. No matter what her professional achievements are, or whether she wished at all to be married, a woman’s respectability and her social status depend on her getting married and showing she is able to produce children, preferably males ones, for society.

With my return after my studies, I got involved with an organization focusing on young women’s rights. In fact, the year of my return to Senegal coincided with the adoption of the gender parity law, which required political parties to ensure that at least half their candidates in local and national elections are women. This allowed Senegal to rank at seventh place worldwide in 2017 and second in Africa after Rwanda. The country is predominantly Muslim but is renowned for its secularism and prides itself on its decades of peace and security. I, for instance, grew up as a Muslim but went to a Catholic school. Yet my country is also one whose criminal code prohibits abortion except when undertaken to save the pregnant woman’s life; moreover, LGBT rights are not protected. Homosexual acts are defined as “acts against nature” and are punishable by up to five years imprisonment. All of this makes Senegal a country of contradictions, where patriarchy today is the legacy not only of French colonization, but also of Islam and its strictures, which were also imported to West Africa. All of these kinds of patriarchy collude with culture to subjugate women and younger men. Yet these versions of culture (and religion) are mostly a legacy of colonialism, which used religion and different tools, such as taxation, to divide and rule (some call it “govern”) while reengineering gender identities, family roles, and, hence, domestic power dynamics.

Although this chapter is not primarily about how coloniality has survived colonialism, I think it is worth giving an example. Even though matrilineal societies are often patriarchal in specific ways, they also contain empowering dimensions: in matriarchal groups, such as the Sereer, the links between one’s mother’s brother and sister and their child are close, and they can inherit from the maternal uncle. However, matrilineal groups (descent through the mother’s line, such as in the Sereer ethnic group) or bilineal groups (descent through both the mother’s and father’s line, such as in the Wolof ethnic group) are becoming more and more patrilineal (descent through the father’s line, such as in the Pulaar-Fulani ethnic group) (Diop). This is important because whereas patrilineal groups are almost always patriarchal—power and descent converge—the same cannot be said for matrilineal societies, which are more egalitarian. Most women and girls are becoming more and more subjugated to male domination in these societies. Therefore, what is happening in these ethnic groups is a tangible example of how cultural practices have also been moulded by colonialism, which colludes with religion and customary but not traditional laws to influence the law, making it more difficult for Muslim women, for instance, to inherit land or other assets in an equitable manner, whereas, traditionally, they were entitled to it the same way their male siblings were. Therefore, these contradictory dynamics make it difficult to discuss any definitive single story about women and girls in my society, especially when it comes to rendering Global South societies technical for development. Returning to my country and becoming increasingly conscious of the gender dynamics at play—even in my professional life as I was the youngest in the entire organization—was very awakening for me and made it clear that I, too, needed to join women’s social movements because my silence would not protect me.

After three years of a long-distance relationship and working in policy research and development, I decided to resume my studies and obtained a scholarship to study for a postgraduate degree in the United Kingdom. As for my partner, he had finished his studies and resumed his professional life. We were finally ready, so we decided. In a relatively small and intimate ceremony in Senegal, we got married—to my mother’s surprise.

My mother is my bedrock, my inspiration. And despite being profoundly attached to some traditions and apparently being a perfect wife and confidant to my father, I knew better. She was a concentré of power, subtlety, determination, resilience, and courage. Being the eldest of my grandmother’s large family, my mother was the only one out of twelve except for the last born to have completed higher education. When she was in high school, she would walk kilometres and save the money she was given for her food and transportation to school to help provide for her younger siblings. When she was in high school, newly-married and pregnant with my older sister at nineteen, she received the very prestigious Prize of the President of Senegal in Philosophy and Spanish. She decided to stop going to university to focus on her family after two hectic weeks of waking up early only to find overcrowded classrooms; she also felt not only torn and exhausted but also guilty about leaving her newly born alone. When she was pregnant with me the year following her joining university, she was admitted into the very competitive Senegalese School of Fine Arts, from which she would graduate and become a professor of fine arts and an artist. But my mother’s career did not reach the heights it should have had in other circumstances because of many sacrifices she made for her family.

Even though she cheerfully admits that her biggest pride is us—her children—she also reminds us often that “for a woman to succeed in her life, she has to make a lot of sacrifices for her family.” I did not agree, and I did not like the word “sacrifice.” I still don’t. But I realized with my mother and other women around me that a woman’s success in my society was gauged by her ability to forget herself and put her husband and her children first. I did not want my success to be a synonym for sacrifice or renouncement. And I am glad that twenty years later, my mom is learning to change her perception of success and wellbeing. She invested her time and efforts to obtain another master’s degree, even when it meant the whole family had to study with her and support her for each assignment, turning it into a public debate at home. My mother is also taking the time to travel outside the country. When she was younger, she had opportunities to participate in international art exhibitions, but she always declined because of us. After all, “the mother of a family has no time to travel. But she has time to die” (Bâ 110).

What affected me the most was her twenty-one-year-long fight to recover the land she lost to a large-scale infrastructural development project by the state. I find it inspirational that she did not lose her will and confidence to reclaim her rights as a citizen and to speak truth to power. This contributed to my fascination in land issues—“la passion foncière” as I call it. My PhD focused on the land rush in Northern Senegal’s agricultural sector. It nurtured my fascination for telling stories with nuances as well as for documenting resistance, solidarity, and struggles. I did not want to tell a single story but nuanced stories with their many outcomes. Through using feminist methodologies, I wanted to document the power dynamics associated with gender and age. As a result, my interest for personal narratives and life stories increased.

Becoming a Mother

Just after our marriage, we moved to London, I from Senegal and he from France, after leaving his job. Soon after, our families started pressuring us again, this time, to have a child. We resisted. I was studying, and he was just starting his career after finishing his studies. We decided that we clearly were not ready. A few years after the wedding, the situation became worse with people within our entourage even insinuating that I (not him) had health or fertility issues and that we should consult a doctor. We decided not to pay any attention. He was even the first to cut short such conversations and questioning, as it was no one else’s business.

Many months after, we decided we were ready to have a child. This was in the first year of my PhD. I remember wanting to have it all in my early twenties: pursuing my writing, starting my doctoral studies, being more financially autonomous, and then, maybe, having a child. I did not publish a second novel, although I was still writing, but all the rest happened in that exact order. We thought then that it was the best time, as I could do my fieldwork while benefiting from the support of my family in Senegal and I could write from anywhere, as my type of studies was part time.

I became pregnant immediately after we started trying, and I can remember knowing so intimately the exact moment I felt pregnant, despite the five or six pregnancy tests telling me otherwise. I kept buying them until one test indicated that I was one to two weeks pregnant a few days later.

Three months into the pregnancy, after knowing the sex of our baby, I wrote a letter to her promising to guide her into this world while remaining true to ourselves. Our families, though in Senegal, started making a lot of recommendations: I should cover my body and my head, avoid working at certain times (before 7:00 a.m., between 1:00 pm and 2:00 p.m. and after 7:00 p.m.) to avoid the “evil eye,” and be more obedient to my husband because the character of my future child and her destiny depended on my being a good wife. This reminded me of my many readings about how in my culture, the uterine descent or mother’s line is said to transmit blood (dereet), character (jikko), and flesh (suux) to the progeny, while the patrilineal descent determines the nerves (siditt), the bones (yax), and courage (fit) (Diagne; Diop). If both descents are important, the matriline is, in reality, given more significance because it is supposed to determine the qualities of the children through the mother’s milk (meen). To illustrate this, only the matrikin is said to permit the transmission of witchcraft (ndëmm) to the offspring; also, the success of the children is said to depend on the mother’s behaviour as illustrated by many Wolof proverbs, such as “ligeeyu ndey, añup doom” (“a mother’s work is lunch for her children”). This saying means that women who endure their marriage will have successful children. As for the father’s line, it transmits the surname to the child who belongs to the father’s family, who is supposed to be responsible for the women and children.

Despite being broke at the time, we wanted a proper naming ceremony for our daughter with a couple of friends. We, however, decided not to follow some of the prescriptions of our ethnic group to name a daughter after her grandfather’s sisters. We decided to give her the two first names of our mothers, my middle name (which all our children will bear, if there are others), and her father’s surname. This was because I was more attached to my middle name, Rama, than to my father’s surname, which I had, nonetheless, kept after our marriage because my religion, Islam, advises that a woman doesn’t change her name after marriage.

Throughout my pregnancy, I continued being a whole woman; I explored any facet of life I had interest in and kept my options open. I worked on my PhD project while travelling and working and exercising until my eighth month of pregnancy.

Becoming a Feminist Activist-Scholar Mother: A Young Woman’s Voice Does Not Break

Before the pregnancy, we had discussed several times our ideal future. Of course, I wanted to resume my professional life after my doctoral studies, but I had never been very at ease a with fixed nine-to-five job. I enjoyed being a scholar-activist at the same time. However, I did not understand that being a new mother would, in fact, lead to reorganizing all of my other activities around it. Just when I found out I was pregnant, I had launched a series of interviews with scholars, activists, artists, and policymakers on issues of interest to the continent. As an early African researcher geographically based in the United Kingdom, I wanted to initiate a dialogue with other young Africans in the diaspora and on the continent on issues of mutual interest. Did my pregnancy trigger my wish to be more of an activist trying to decolonise and democratise knowledge while abolishing boundaries between policy research and action, and contributing to the legacy we would transmit to the ones yet to come? I don’t know. I am still thinking about the role of the intellectual, but it is certainly not a role that only requires thinking without transforming the world(s) we have in common. In my dream feminist future, I would work just a few hours per day to earn a living—the necessary amount to be comfortable. Becoming rich has never been a life objective for me. I was, therefore, also thinking about financial sustainability.

The final week of the pregnancy was fast approaching. After four days of going to the hospital and being returned home, labour finally started on a Tuesday night. After several hours of gas and air, screaming, laughing, and crying, our daughter finally arrived the following day by water birth. This allowed us both to play an active role during the delivery. My husband in particular was the one doing extensive skin-to-skin contact with her while I was sleeping. I was grateful I did not have any stitches; I just felt sleepy and hungry afterwards. The first few days of us returning home were sleepless as well as emotionally and physically exhausting, but we were amazed by her.

After her arrival, life as we knew it was over, as were the certainties and the values my mother inculcated in me. We decided we would invent a new path for our family. And for the two parents we were, our naivety to believe we could be a nice feminist family was a blessing in disguise. The likely scenario for our team was that I would be the main caring parent (I thought I could work on my PhD from home) and he would be the second parent. But then, I realized that was not what I wanted. I did not work hard to start a PhD only to suddenly renounce to everything because of motherhood. We decided to have a child together; we would share the tasks equally. We had several conversations, often stormy, and we finally came to the agreement to share the tasks equally accordingly to financial contribution. I had four days and he one initially because I had a student budget. But I decided it was unfair because of all the emotional and unpaid care work I was also doing when I was at home with her. I started working part time from home when my daughter was sleeping and when I was not working on my research project. As for my husband, he started developing his own projects before we decided to have a child. But with pregnancy, his wish to work for himself and be able to design his own business model and have more flexible working hours became stronger. Therefore, he started to work part time for another company while working on his project the rest of the time. And just after the birth of our daughter, he resigned from his job and started working fulltime on his project with his business partner. He initially started working four days a week and worked from home the rest of the week, when he would be the main carer. Eventually, he started working three days a week away from home and two from home to take care of our daughter while I was at the university library. I reckon we were able to reorganize ourselves and reach our dream parenting balance because of his intersecting privileges (Cho et al): the flexibility of his job came from a firm and carefully designed agreement on what we wanted our parenting our child to resemble.

After welcoming our daughter into this world, we were tired, but little did we know that what we were experiencing at the time was the mildest level of tiredness. Fortunately, a few weeks after our daughter was born, my mother came to London from Senegal to spend a month with us. And with her visit, I rediscovered how being a mother is valued in my society: the massages that are provided to both mother and baby, and the special preparation of the mother’s food for her to have the nutrients she and the baby need, and the long hours to rest. Some women even leave the marital house to return to their parents’ house to rest and be taken care of. All of which I did not have in London, and even breast-feeding in public is still an issue.

Soon after, with the prospect of resuming my studies after a six-month maternity break, I realized my biggest challenge would be to reconcile my new role of mother with those of expatriate, feminist, passionate wife and lover, resourceful student-researcher, reader, and tireless traveller. I was torn between the refuge-cocoon that I had built since I became a mother and the prospect of returning to a busy life. Also, at the beginning of the adventure of mothering, I was not able to find the precious time I used to have to spend with myself; the sweet solitude that I loved to slip into in order to read, write, feel, meditate, and reflect was only but a memory. When my daughter was sixteen months old, I decided to stop the breastfeeding, and then a few weeks after, we found a nursery place for her. She went three days a week, and each of us had her for one day a week. Since we had found an emotional, social, financial, and love balance after the initial earthquake of parenting, I decided to resume participating in academic conferences, which is an important facet for any researcher (or researcher-to-be). This forced me to familiarize myself with all the logistics behind #PhDoingWhileParenting, and I was struck by a harsh reality: 95 per cent of conference organizers refuse to take care of the additional cost of travelling with a baby, even if she is breastfeeding. Several times, I had to buy her ticket (thankfully only 10 per cent of the price of my ticket), find a babysitter while in London, and arrive a little earlier so that the nanny got to spend time with my little one in my presence for her to get used to being without me (the settling period). During the conferences, I had to escape during lunch and coffee breaks to breastfeed and spend time with my little one.

We decided to resume our respective activities. In March that year, I had to go to Cape Town, South Africa, for a program on leading in public life. From our first interactions, the organizers made it clear that they would not take care of my daughter’s ticket but encouraged me to wait until the following year. I refused because I believed mothers are the first leaders in public life, and it was out of the question for me to exclude myself. My husband was able to find a babysitter, thanks to his circle of friends in the Cape area, where he had worked for a while. Imagine the cost of a baby ticket and two weeks of babysitting on a student budget. But I took part anyway, and this program transformed me. But this intensive program was also a marathon. While my daughter was resting well in our hotel room, I went on all-day rounds to breastfeed and spend time with her. I’m proud to have also had an impact on the organizers, as they have decided from now on to take care of the costs for babies (less than one year) of parents who take part in the program—it was not retroactive, though.

After this conference, I went to another trip in Southern Africa. This conference went well, but the return flight was catastrophic, as we were taken off the plane in Lusaka on suspicion of a contagious disease. I was in an unknown country and was forcefully removed from the plane with my baby because I expressed the fear that I might have an allergy after I started itching. Despite finding a bed bug in my clothing, which I showed to the flight attendant, I was taken out of the plane and left with the promise I would be booked another flight if I brought the proof of my fitness to travel. When my colleagues and passengers dared to interrogate why I was taken out for examination, since I had nothing—even a doctor proposed to consult me on board—they were all made to sit down and mind their own business. Then I let my anger explode, which led to the police and security being called, who threatened me to stop filming the scene with my camera and then threatened to separate me from my daughter if I did not leave the Emirates plane. Yes, there it was: Misogynoir! The intersection between racism and sexism to make me—yet another angry black woman who dared to resist and speak up—shut the fuck up!

When I returned to London, I was traumatized. Even the messages of support, sympathy, and encouragement from friends left me with this bitter taste of doubt. Then I resolved: if I let this experience traumatize me, my relationship to parenting, to mothering, and to my social relationships would be transformed forever. I started to firmly agree with Ama Ata Aidoo that “a girl’s voice does not break, it grows firmer.” Having an academic and a professional life for a Senegalese woman living in Europe, especially in England, has emotional, social, and financial costs, but this is not a reason to systematically refuse invitations or to not ask that the cost of travelling with your little one be covered if you travel with her, as I do. Even if the response is a no, I go anyway because it is important to continue to occupy these spaces and not to exclude myself. And when I do go, I undertake another type of advocacy around why we need to occupy these spaces with our children.

At home, I started talking more to my child about feelings and how to express them and manage them, and to my husband; I voiced my anger whenever I felt it and encouraged them to do the same. I started listening more to his laments and his intersecting vulnerabilities, especially around toxic masculinity, which would constantly judge him because he wanted to be another type of father for his daughter—one that would be more present, express his feelings, and encourage her to respect her opinions and her body and to know that she was enough. This reminded me of an anthology exploring Fathers and Daughters relations edited by Ato Quayson. In his chapter Voyage Round my Daughter in Quayson’s anthology, Simon Gikandi shares the following:

Stories of fathers and daughters … are weapons against the stigma that we African men are condemned to bear in our sojourns in the world of the other. We know what this stigma is because we live with it—the unquestioned assumption, irrespective of our family traditions and communal backgrounds, irrespective of our relation with our mothers, sisters and daughters, that we are the last custodians of an unrelenting patriarchy…. And yet, we know, as do our mothers, sisters, and daughters, that our connections to the rules of matrilinearity run deep and that our daughters are the constant reminder of our ordinariness. (68-69).

I also started paying more attention to my daughter’s firm and sharp little “noes” with the body gesture please—no to strangers trying to play with her or touch her, no to the bottle, or no to wearing shoes when she just wanted to run on the grass barefoot. When we started hearing her out, she tried, much to our surprise, the calm and soft “yeah,” as if she were breathing at last. I too was breathing. And I also loved the time she and I would spend reading. I loved the bond it created between us, and I am glad I transmitted to her my love for books, and that it is even one of the first words she said.

Much to my disappointment, motherhood was not all rosy. I realized society had a certain way of making mothers feel unwanted and disposable as well as in a constant nervous condition, especially in those areas outside the family—except if we redefined the line and demanded not to be put into boxes. Travelling with a baby is not easy; far from it, nor is working or studying. I realized that most spaces are hardly baby- or family-friendly, especially as far as mothers are concerned. Although I recognize the privilege in being able to afford travelling to attend conferences with a baby, I started questioning the whole politics of the whole academic world and the way it treated mothers and fathers, making it difficult for the two roles to be compatible or even punishing them for choosing to parent. And my partner, who took four months of paternity leave, was treated by his coworkers like a curious beast or was overcongratulated for only doing his parenting responsibilities. People also asked him about where I was any time he said he was alone with his daughter.

Six months into parenting came the prospect of doing my doctoral fieldwork in northern Senegal, which implied being separated from our new family: I would have to go away alone for two periods of three months with my child and without her father. But we were also anxious because I was living in areas of rural Senegal where I had never lived myself. I decided to go anyway, the fear for me was that I would definitively abandon my studies if I did not go. Moreover, despite the sadness of the upcoming separation with his little one, my husband was also convinced that I had to go without him, as he could not leave his job. The trip to Senegal began with a trip to Morocco for the three of us. We decided it was important to spend time together before the separation.

It Grows Firmer!

With resuming my research came another unexpected project: an anthology project on feminist parenting. The book project was born when my daughter and I travelled to Senegal for my doctoral fieldwork. In Dakar, where we stayed a few weeks before travelling to rural Senegal, our two families celebrated their first meeting with their granddaughter and niece. Apart from my mother, who had spent a month with us in London when she was born, all of them were only just meeting her.

One day, I was at home with my mother, sister, daughter, and our cousin, who is a nurse. She had come home called by my mother to pierce my daughter’s, her namesake’s, ears. For more than two minutes, I powerlessly watched my daughter cry. Then I left the room, and when I returned, it was done. Yet she was still crying. That day, I started reflecting about the choices we make for our child and the choices we think are ours. Since my daughter was born, my parents and sisters in Senegal would ask “Have you shaved her? Have you pierced her ears? Are you massaging her?” I would answer no to the first two questions and yes to the last one. In fact, I was not massaging her; my mom who came to visit us after her birth was.

I did not say anything because I knew the virtue of massaging for babies. Yet I could not help but interrogate my mother when she would say the function of each massage was to shape her body to render it more feminine, including good hips “that will allow her to give birth without difficulty” and a more preeminent booty. She explained to me before leaving London that normally my daughter would have to wear a pearl necklace that would keep her neck high. She had reminded me several times that I should go and have myself some massage sessions. I do respect and defend many cultural practices not only because they are part of my heritage and because I value them but also because I felt the need to overcome the myths about African cultures being backwards and reconnect with my roots, for they have been beautifully passed on from generation to generation. For instance, I have always admired how in Senegal, women who have just given birth are taken care of. I also from time to time have loved to challenge those who follow any cultural practice simply because that is the way things should be. Therefore, having my mother keep asking me questions about her grandchild getting her ears pierced even after she left must have reawakened my mischievous side. And frankly I had not particularly reflected on those questions and just thought it wasn’t a priority, since my schedule on those first months was quite hectic. I must have asked once at the medical centre whether they pierced babies’ ears and they answered they did not. Then I might have decided it was not that important. But witnessing the cries of my daughter because I was too much of a coward to say, “No, she will decide when she grows up,” left me with the firm decision I would not let such a thing happen again.

Reflecting on how to articulate my resistance, I decided that writing and organizing collectively to amplify parents’ voices on feminist parenting was crucial, especially by mobilizing such experiences in the non-Western world. How was it that I saw rarely African and Global South feminists publicly discuss the issue of feminist parenting? Was it because after long, secular struggles to prove they could work outside the house, some of them did not want to return in the private sphere and decided not to reclaim parenting as a prime and fertile political site? Or was it still the old debate between womanism3 and African and Black feminism(s)? Wasn’t there any value of reclaiming anything domestic, since many feminists saw motherhood as one of the principal reasons for women’s subjugation to patriarchy: the vile production and repro-duction to sustain capitalism(s) and patriarchies? Or was the erasure of African and Global South feminist parents’ (and children)’s agency because they needed to be (re)presented as only poor women and girls without any agency—an image dear to the mainstream aid and development industry? All these reflections led me to return to the writings from the non-Western world. From familiarizing myself with the writings of Western feminists such as Adrienne Rich’s Of Women Born, I then migrated all the way to Chimamanda Ndozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele and Oyèrónké Oyèwùmí’s What Gender Is Motherhood?. My child was then eight months old. The Feminist Parenting book project has been an adventure for me, and I believe for the other parents involved as well, because the idea came from personal reflections about the way I wanted to relate to my child—the way I found myself doing it because I am in a heterosexual couple, and the way the outside world is also intervening and sometimes mediating, facilitating, and disrupting my parenting practice. I wanted to know the personal history of every contributing parent and how each understood their story of feminist parenting, including the why and the why not as well as the how and under which circumstances. It was a collective learning process for all of us through the owning, telling, and sharing of our experiences. It has been an adventure.

Passing on Life and Love, Dealing with Grief and Bringing the Village Back In

My older sister, Anta, recently passed away, a few hours after giving birth to her third healthy child. It was not a natural death. It was not an accident. It was medical error. This awakens so many questions for me: how feasible and realistic is conceptualizing feminist futures when women are still dying from giving birth in 2019? This shows how the personal remains political and how the economic is also political. The lack of adequate health infrastructure, as well as the lack of qualified provision of health services, kills. The lack of basic social services kills. Corruption kills. The lack of accountability kills. The lack of agency to articulate and exercise one’s civic rights kills. Poverty kills. These are eminently political issues. These are, indeed, feminist issues. At the moment, I am thrown into the emergency of learning to deal with my grief and learning to help mother her children—the same way that Anta came with me to northern Senegal when I was conducting fieldwork and helped and supported my work, and nurtured my child as her own. I am now—with her husband, my parents, my grand-mother, and my sisters—part of the army of other-parents who have stood up to continue her legacy and take care of her children. She left us the hard task of dealing with her presence-absence and the joy of bringing the collective back into the labour of love that is parenting. No doubt it will not be a peaceful and tranquil journey; it will also include difficult debates and consensus making.

More than ever, alone in the crowd with my grief, together in family, I believe in the power of collective organizing and in the power of storytelling as a way to be present to one self and to show up for others. As Amina Mama says,

Writing offers us the means to move beyond the crush and confusion of the immediate present. Writing also offers us the chance to maintain our sense of who we are, self-respect intact, in the knowledge that we have challenged the paradigms bestowed upon us by histories and herstories that have not been of our own making. As such it is often therapeutic as well as political, subversive as well as transformative. Above all it is an irresistible temptation. Write, rewrite, and write again. (20)

Conclusion

Raising a child is difficult, and it requires kindness to and solidarity with parents. In this chapter, I have shared how the legacy of parenting from my mother and my own realities led me to also invent another way to coparent with my husband and to build bridges with other individuals from mostly non-Western backgrounds and in the diaspora who also identify as feminist parents. Parenting is also such an important terrain that I believe it must be repoliticized because educating our children not to dominate or oppress is not only a fight against our patriarchal and capitalist societies but also a fight against the self. Parents have so much potential power in their hands that I believe there is much potential in rethinking the way we parent and the way we let also our children guide us into parenting them better by constantly negotiating our shared relationships, iteratively and endlessly talking back to them and listening to them, as well as reengineering our much fluid and nondefinitive parenting pact. Parenting my daughter and my sister’s children has taught me to be kinder to my parents and to other parents and carers around me. Parenting is truly a labour of love, and the goal is for everyone to remain alive and together in the end, despite the extremely bumpy and less travelled road.

Endnotes

1. Taken from Aidoo, Ama Ata, “A Young Woman’s Voice Does Not Break, It Grows Firmer.”

2. The quote is taken from Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. flipped eye publishing, 2011.

3. “Womanism” is a term coined by Alice Walker in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose to conceptualise a definition of feminism that is not based on gender equality but on race and colour. It is universalistic, and she defines a womanist as “A woman who loves another woman, sexually and/or nonsexually. She appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility … [she] is committed to the survival and wholeness of an entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically for health … loves the spirit…. loves struggle. Loves herself. Regardless” (xi-xii).

The journey to become a black woman academic in South Africa, before the ending of apartheid in 1994, was not an easy task. There were very few black women positioned as lecturers or senior lecturers at the time and certainly none that we knew as professors (currently only 2 per cent of the professors in South Africa are black women). In Cape Town, where I lived and worked, we were a relatively close knit group of black junior lecturers supporting each other while competing in a highly cutthroat individualistic academic environment—an environment ready for neither black women professors or for black intellectuals more generally. In the 1990s, through the Southern Africa Political Economy Series (SAPES), based in Zimbabwe, a few of us were able to engage with powerful African feminists, such as Patricia McFadden, Ruth Meena, and Rudo Gaidzanwa. We defined ourselves as feminists and fought to have feminism included in the curricula of our respective disciplines in our universities. As we progressed with and/or completed our degrees, many of us were of the age when decisions about having children were being made.

I can still recall some of those conversations and the conscious choices we, for various reasons, made to either have or not have children. Becoming a mother through the act of giving birth (for there are other ways of becoming a mother and of mothering), or choosing not to, is therefore a conscious decision for feminists. Making a choice to become, and when to become, a mother is the first act of feminist mothering. Deciding whether or not to be a mother breaks with the patriarchal assumption that motherhood is a natural destiny for women, that a woman’s place is in the home, and that her roles in society are primarily located in the spheres of reproduction and nurturing. The ability to exercise choice is also closely associated with the freedom to do so and with the security that this provides.

Although I was in my mid-thirties when I gave birth to Malaika, I had already pondered about having a child in my early twenties and had named my prospective child then already. Malaika is a Swahili name meaning “my angel.” The name was made famous in a Swahili song written by the Tanzanian musician Adam Salim in 1945, and is sung by, among others, the South African musician Miriam Makeba in the 1970s. The choice of my daughter’s name is itself a reflection of my early pan-African leanings.

Although motherhood was definitely in my realm of personal identification, I also knew that it would not be the only role that defined me. I was curious about the world and wanted to study and travel. I was passionate about resisting injustice in all its forms, and I wanted to make a meaningful contribution to the transformation of our societies. I believed I could do all those things—have a fulfilling career and also being a mother. However, to accomplish these goals, I was also cognizant of the fact that I would have to delay having a child until at least some of my goals were accomplished. By this time, I was already approaching the age when women begin to worry about their fertility and hear echoing phrases about biological clocks ticking.

At the time, I thought I had prepared myself sufficiently to make the decision to have a child. In hindsight, nothing really prepares one for the changes that accompany having a child. It is not merely the physical transformation of one’s body or the sudden realization of how much time a baby can consume that is a shock. It is also the acute awareness that your child is completely dependent on you for its physical, emotional, and intellectual wellbeing and that you are now responsible for its survival.

After my PhD comprehensive exams at the University of South Carolina, I had delayed writing my thesis. However, once Malaika was born, I completed the thesis pretty quickly. I became constantly aware of time constraints and I realized that if the thesis were to reach completion, I would have to write it while Malaika was sleeping. We lived in Toronto, Canada, at the time, so there was little in the way of family support.

Soon after I graduated, I was awarded a one year postdoctoral fellowship in the United States, which meant I would be in the United States during the week and in Canada on the weekends. There was quite a bit of guilt about this arrangement, as it had me away from my daughter for substantial periods of time. When her father and I separated, this became a bone of contention because her father could now claim primary caregiving responsibility during the period of my fellowship. At the time, however, it was what I needed in order to progress in academe. The choice between childrearing and career advancement is one that the majority of women have to navigate. For those who choose both, it often comes at an enormous personal expense. This was no different for me. It was then, too, that I made a conscious decision not to have another child.

After the postdoctoral fellowship, I decided to move back to South Africa. Again, I had to make a conscious choice between staying with Malaika in Toronto or going home to where I thought I could make a more meaningful contribution (since I was unable to take her home with me at the time due to a custody dispute). Although it was one of the hardest personal decisions I have had to make, I do not have any regrets about it. Malaika remained in Canada with her father while I went back to my previous position at the University of the Western Cape. Upon my return, I spent a lot of time trying to get her to join me. This experience, I think, also contributed towards my feminist mothering. It was important for me not to feel disempowered or confined because I was a mother and to engage the custody dispute from a position of strength, even if that meant being away from Malaika for a year.

We do not cease being mothers when we are away from our children. Our care takes on different forms. It is, however, important that we nurture ourselves first so that we can be the best mothers we are able to be. Being a mother should be a conscious feminist choice; how we chose to perform the role of motherhood should be, too.

Mothering Malaika

Malaika joined me in South Africa a year later. Although she saw her father, who lived in Toronto, on holidays and he has always been present in her life, the primary responsibility for her wellbeing was now mine. I, however, had friends, family, and a helper in South Africa who gave me the necessary support I needed. Without that support network, it would have been extremely difficult to pursue the career I now have, which went from academe to the NGO sector and back to academe as a professor of politics and international relations. My work entailed a fair amount of travel on the continent. It could only be undertaken if others assisted with the caregiving responsibilities of motherhood—cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and ensuring that children got to school on time. I was, therefore, never a conventional mother. My child complained all the time that I was not at parent-teacher meetings or there to pick her up from school—I was not a “soccer mom.” I saw my role more in terms of inculcating values, norms, and discipline as well as earning enough money so that we could live a relatively secure lifestyle.

Malaika, therefore, did not grow up in a home where there was conventional parenting or a sexual division of labour. In her father’s home, he did the cooking and cleaning, and in our home, I was not the person undertaking these tasks, which has also affected the ways in which she has interpreted these roles—she does not align them to a particular gender.

I am an independent woman who has been able to succeed in career spaces in which men dominate. Malaika has often had to listen to me talk about the difficulties of my work environment and has had to listen to me prepare to give various talks. It was important that she and other young women see that they can be anything they want to be and that it takes commitment and passion to be successful. It is also important for our children to understand that we work not for individual success but for the greater good, that we are part of a collective, that we confront challenges while speaking truth to power, and that we seek to create a more just and equitable world. Having a feminist consciousness is about having a social consciousness.

I did not sit Malaika down to teach her. There is no curriculum for this. Feminist mothering is not about instructing. It is about creating different experiences and exposing children to diverse sets of gender and social relations through engagement, conversation, literature, film, culture, and so forth. It is about creating an awareness about power relations and promoting the values of equality and dignity that should be present in all our relationships. Malaika was part of our dinner table discussions; she also watched documentaries and movies with me, and had access to my books. Through the people I interacted with, she was also exposed to a world where gender constructions were debunked and where people could freely express their sexuality.

There were no men in the house, and she went to an all-girls school, which gave her the added confidence she now has as a woman. She did not have to spend her formative years competing with boys at school and/or competing with girls for their attention.

She did however have to deal with the race issue. South Africa was and remains highly racialized and a rather inward-looking society. She often had to deal with racism at school and within the extended family. In as much as I wanted to shield her from those experiences, I also wanted to equip her to be able to have the consciousness and emotional security to be able to traverse those encounters. In order to do so, I had to expose her to a world beyond the narrow confines of South Africa and its identity constructions.

In my own development, redefining myself as a pan-African feminist and working towards the greater good of women across the continent was liberating. Such a transformation enabled me to situate myself in a larger collective of people who have had similar experiences and who have been agents of their own destiny. I wanted Malaika to discover this, too. Only time will tell how far this has resonated with her, but telling signs are already there. I have seen her struggle with her identity construction and emerge from that inner contestation as a self-aware black woman actively claiming and embracing her identity.

I was, therefore, not surprised that she was one of the first students at her school to want to wear her hair in its natural curl, which led to many others at the school following suit and to a protest by learners at the school who wanted to wear their hair naturally that received international attention. There is now a change in the policies of many schools in South Africa for how black children can wear their hair. During the organization of the protests, I saw her grab my Angela Davies books and read them. A year later, Fanon and Biko disappeared from my book shelf. She was, therefore, grappling with the intersectionality of race and gender in South Africa.

By the time she entered university, I knew that my work as a pan-African feminist mother was largely done and that she now had to go and explore the world further on her own. Feminist mothering, I would like to believe, endowed her with the necessary confidence to chart her own way in this world. I look at her and I am proud of who she has become. I cannot talk about school plays or sports trophies, but I can speak about motherhood that enables a daughter to have the kind of sense of justice and equity that we need more of in the world. These are the values and beliefs that have emerged from my years of pan-African feminist mothering.

Malaika’s Narration of Her Experience

Within the past two years of my life as a university student, the issues of patriarchy, gender-based violence, race, cultural sensitivity, and many other crucial social issues have come to the forefront of my thought process. Every day, I learn more and more about how to navigate my way through the world as a young woman of colour. Every day, I learn more and more about what that means and how my identity both disadvantages me in wider society and how it nuances my human experiences. It is in these day-to-day moments of learning that the idea of feminist mothering becomes increasingly important to me.

My mother is by her own definition a Pan-African feminist. This identity is something that has framed her life in a multitude of ways: from the work spaces she inhabits, the books she reads, the music she listens to, and the social spaces she finds herself in. Growing up, there was nothing I could do but follow these same patterns of behaviour. Without much note at first, as her daughter, I have absorbed her teachings in such a way that being in her presence allowed her to teach me without her lecturing to me. In her lifetime, she has done feminist work both in and out of academic spaces. Hearing her think aloud made me, as a youth, grapple with issues concerning women’s place in both academe and wider society, women’s place in South Africa and Africa at large, as well as what it means to be a woman in the world. These are ideas that I find myself wrestling with more now, and, increasingly, I relate my present ideas to the notions my mother originally provided me.

Her library spans the entire back room of our home and includes Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba. When in need of something to read before I went to bed or caught the train, I looked to her library. Thus, my mother has been an avenue to work I didn’t know I was interested in until I found it.

When I sit in my gender and writing classes in university this year, I’m increasingly shocked at the reading list. The ones I find myself enjoying most I look into who the author is. Almost without fail this year, my favourite texts have been authored by women I personally know through my mother, such as Desiree Lewis, Elaine Salo, and others—women I know as aunts and family friends. I now learn from them not only in private spaces but also in academic settings.

In my own day-to-day life, the teachings of my mother have become increasingly present. When in conversation with friends around the issues that affect us on a daily basis (whether it be what we’re learning on campus or the fact that we can’t walk through the inner city without being catcalled), increasingly I hear my mother and the women with whom she surrounds herself in my speech. I find myself increasingly able to look at social situations for not only what they are but also in terms of how I would want a feminist, nonracialized and, increasingly, more equal society to look like. This is a worldview I can accredit, in large part, to having a mother who defines herself as feminist.

Conclusion

Mothering is a conscious choice for feminists. Feminist mothering enables children to have a deeper love and respect for themselves and others as well as a deeper understanding of how the world and social and gender relations are constructed. It also provides them with a sturdy scaffolding for their own self-realization. Feminist mothering empowers both mother and child (and all others in the family) to be who they aspire to be and to fulfill their life’s purpose. Feminist mothering takes courage, as society will judge and criticize those who break the stereotypes of how a mother is supposed to behave. It is important for young feminist mothers to build personal relations with other feminists who are able to guide and support them through the very tough choices they will inevitably have to make. Feminist mothering is fundamentally about teaching the norms and values of equality and about actively working to change the power dynamic between men and women and girls and boys. Pan-Africanism is about unity, solidarity, and dignity. Together, these are transformative values. They have made a lasting impact on me, and I trust that they will inspire my daughter and many others to continue to strive for the kind of society in which we all can enjoy the freedom, dignity, and growth that have been so long fought for and by so many.