Pan-Africanism, feminism and popular education in the struggle against water grabbing in Africa: an interview with Coumba Toure

Abstract

abstract This interview with Coumba Toure, feminist, Pan-African activist, and educator took place as part of a debriefing session at the end of a three day strategic planning workshop that brought together activists, artists, trade unionists, educators and organisations fighting imperialism, sexism and the privatisation of water in the face of the upcoming World Water Forum to be hosted in Dakar Senegal in 2021. The gathering was co-hosted by the Blue Planet Project, an international water justice coalition with whom Koni Benson does organising and education work, and by Africans Rising, a Pan-African movement of people and organisations working to build a continent-wide solidarity for a self-determined future, coordinated by Coumba Toure. This interview inquires about how Coumba thinks about strategies for building connected bottom-up movements across Senegal, and across Africa, that are feminist, Pan-Africanist and intergenerational. Coumba’s political journey to achieve this approach to her work is the main focus of the interview where she exemplifies the rejection of conventional boundaries between fields of expertise that often begin to mould and professionalise gender justice experts, teachers, NGO activists and published writers. What accounts for the ways in which she applies the principles of the African Feminist Charter, and the politics of Pan-African liberation to her daily life and work? We discuss why we are opposing and attempting to build a People’s Alternative to the World Water Forum which aims to open up Africa’s water to marketplaces of the global North. The interview unpacks how Coumba came to employ the approach of bringing older and younger activists, artists, students and communities into the daunting space of water specialists and professionalised NGOs, and what we hope to build through these spaces of connection, opposition and alternatives.