We recently talked to Rosebell Kagumire about women’s rights and peacebuilding. Rosebell is a powerful Pan-African feminist voice, as well as curator and editor of the African Feminism web platform. She is also a member of the r0g_agency’s strategic advisory board.

Here are some of her thoughts:

“We still live in a heavily patriarchal world. We have the economics of war and conflict. And when you look particularly at Africa, you have governments still struggling with legitimacy stemming from poor nation building as a heritage of colonialism. You have different nations within a country; those identities cannot be suppressed. And of course, resource conflicts are at the heart of this capitalist, patriarchal, imperialistic system that we are living under.

We need to change the systems. We need systems that serve the people. That guarantees everybody’s dignity. That allows everybody to be heard, to live as they wish without violence, without harassment. Therefore, we have to eliminate hierarchies. Because the competition for resources and power creates hierarchies and vice versa. Men are better and more worthy than women and children. White people are better and more worthy than black and other peoples. Heterosexual people are the norm and the rest of the people can be hunted or made miserable. These are the current hierarchies that have to be addressed in their complexity, because millions of women in the world are not just marginalized because of being women, but discriminated against based on other factors as well.”