Living an African feminist life - decolonial perspectives: a conversation

The interview conversation focuses on Victoria Kawesa’s take on African and decolonial feminism, discussed against the backdrop of her life story as an anti-racist, feminist activist, writer, and scholar. Victoria has been based in Sweden since she arrived there as a nine-year-old in 1984 together with her mother and siblings, coming as political refugees from Uganda, a country steeped in civil war at the time. As a practising Catholic, Victoria’s father had been brutally murdered by the secret police of the then Ugandan leader, Idi Amin. The interview aligns itself with the personal–political–theoretical starting points of Victoria’s research, working its way from her childhood in Black-normative Uganda to her experiences of racism in white-normative Sweden. It links glimpses of her life history narrative, as told in her forthcoming dissertation, Black Masks/White Sins: Becoming a Black Obuntu Feminist, with the theoretical and political perspectives she also develops there. The conversation focuses on corpo- and geopolitical situatedness, and how it matters for transnational feminist cartographies, onto-epistemologies, and possibilities for alliance building. From her situated perspective, Victoria emphasizes the need for differentiation within Black Feminism to make space for African and decolonial feminisms, based on other genealogies than the middle-passage epistemologies that dominate US contexts.