Pan-Africanism has seen the contribution of numerous female African activists throughout its lifespan, despite the systemic lack of attention paid to them by scholars and male pan-Africanist alike
Amy Jacques Garvey, who founded the international newspaper Negro World, was heavily involved in other Pan-Africanism organisations, such as the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist International African Service Bureau. She also helped organise the Fifth Pan-African Congress. Amy Jacques Garvey used her platform to spread Pan-Africanism globally and used her position as editor for the Negro World to write a column called “Our Women and what they think”, dedicated to black women.
Claudia Jones was another pan-Africanist. In order to fight against racism towards black people in Britain, Jones set up the West Indian Gazette, which sought to cover topics such as the realities of South African apartheid and decolonisation.[42] Notable male Pan-Africanists, such as Kwame Nkrumah, were influenced by Jones as she incorporated Marxist- Leninist philosophy into Pan-Africanism.
In the United States, Audley Moore and Dara Abubakari played a vital role in developing Pan-African thought. These women significantly shaped the ideological and organizational contours of Pan-Africanism, developing a gender-conscious strand of Pan-Africanism that was focused on the realities faced by African-American women, separate from those of African-American men. Both Moore and Abubakari were prominent members of the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women in Louisiana, which engaged in anti-colonial activities, welfare rights, and Pan-Africanist activism. In 1972, Moore was a featured speaker at the All-Africa Women’s Conference in Dar es Salaam where she encouraged solidarity among women across the continent and demanded the inclusion of African American women into the conversation, emphasising that they too were committed to liberating Africa.
In the Caribbean, Peggy Antrobus lobbied policymakers to highlight that Caribbean women were the poorest in the Caribbean and that UNICEF was the first international organization to draw attention to the negative impact of structural adjustment on the poor, particularly women.
Alice Victoria Alexander Kinloch was born in 1863 in Cape Town, South Africa, before her family moved to Kimberley. The racist and segregated environment shaped her activism on systemic oppression in South Africa. In June 1885 she married Edmund Ndosa Kinloch, a diamond miner who worked at the De Beers mining compound in Kimberley. She witnessed the degrading working conditions of the compound premised upon the exploitation of black South Africans, such as the practice of making hundreds of black miners attend work naked to ensure diamonds were not being stolen. Kinloch wrote two articles in 1896, after moving to Britain in 1895, for the society named “The Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man”, which was well received and earned her high praise from the editors. Her experiences and clear articulation of the South African political situation both through literature and speeches resonated with the British liberal intelligentsia. Kinloch frequently made efforts to engage in dialogue with activist groups in England. She spoke at Newcastle, York and Manchester for the Aborigines Protection Society which led to a resolution being passed that demanded the British government to end racial oppression in South Africa.
Kinloch’s detailed accounts of the nature of black oppression in Africa was unprecedented for these organisations who rarely had the opportunity to hear first-hand accounts of the African political situation. Now fully engrossed in the British anti-colonial dialogue, she wrote a 19-page pamphlet on the diamond trade in South Africa was in 1897, her views were beginning to become distinctly Pan-African in their calls for an end to continental dehumanisation. Kinloch’s main contribution to pan-Africanism however was in her co-founding of the African Association in 1897 with lawyers Henry Sylvester Williams and Thomas J. Thompson, where they and 11 or 12 others gathered at the Charing-Cross Mansions hotel in London. Kinloch served as treasurer but in 1898 returned to South Africa with her husband. Two years later, the African Association led the Pan-African Conference, which was widely regarded as the beginning of 20th-century Pan-Africanism. Dr Tshepo Mvulane Moloi calls Kinloch the “founding mother of Pan-Africanism”.
Jeanne Martin Cissé was instrumental in the independence of Guinea and in bringing African women’s rights to the forefront of the colonial debate, for example influencing Guinea’s protection of women’s rights enshrined in its constitution. Central to Cissé’s work was the idea that the UN could provide an international framework that would protect African girls and women from issues such as forced marriage. In response to rapidly increasing birth rates, while in government, she stressed the importance of family planning and legislated sex education in Guinea’s primary schools, despite strong opposition from the Muslim majority population. In an article written in 1979, on the family dynamic in Africa, Cissé makes unprecedented criticisms of the forced role of mothers in brainwashing their daughters to follow prescriptive gender roles. She was also instrumental in the 1968 legislation in Guinea which outlawed polygamy, believing it would effectively combat the widespread abandonment of families by fathers, thus relieving the physical burden mothers faced in Guinea. On the international level, Cissé was the first African president of the United Nations Security Council in 1972 and succeeded in passing two resolutions, condemning Israel’s aggression against Palestine, and Apartheid in South Africa. She also drafted and helped pass the UN Convention on Consent and Minimum Age for Marriage in 1964, which provided a wide framework for legislation across Africa.
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (FRK) was born in 1900 and studied in England in 1922. She returned to her home town of Abeokuta, in the Ogun state region of Nigeria, where she began her extensive work in Nigerian and international activism. Her achievements were unprecedented: being the first woman with a top-ranking position in a leading political party (the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons), the first woman to drive a car in Nigeria, and the first African woman to travel to the Eastern Bloc, visiting China and Russia during the Cold War. Her son, Fela Kuti, became a world-renowned musician and founder of the genre called Afrobeat, a political musical movement that was intensely Pan-African. Scholars who study the life of FRK and her son conclusively agree that she was the main political influence on the Pan-African and political dimension to his music. In 1949, FRK founded and led the Nigerian Women’s Union which in 1953 changed its name to the Federation of Nigerian Women’s Societies, rallying for inter-regional unity among women’s movements in Nigeria. Subsequently, she was courted by international movements for women’s rights such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and the Wom’n’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She also became embroiled in the politics of Ghana, where she became a friend of the leading African voice on Pan Africanism and president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, who credited her ‘with being an inspiration to the Ghana Women’s Association.’ One of her most notable contributions was the formation of the Abeokuta Ladies Club – this was a collective of Nigerian market women, whose powerful economic position in Abeokuta sought to influence the colonial policy which destroyed their ability to make money and remain independent. By the 1940s, more than 20,000 women had a membership. She changed the name to the Abeokuta Women’s Union, marking the movement towards direct activism. For example, in November 1947, she was responsible for organising demonstrations that as many as 10,000 women participated. She continued to organise for women’s rights all her life until in 1977, when a government raid conducted in response to her son Fela Kuti’s activism, led to her being thrown from a second storey window. She died from her injuries in 1978
