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

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.

keywords:

• Coumba Toure
• Pan-Africanism
• feminism
• popular education
• water justice

Notes

1 Africans Rising is a Pan-African movement of people and organisations, working for justice, peace and dignity to foster an Africa-wide solidarity. Africans Rising amplifies broad demands connecting struggles, building solidarity and cooperation within and amongst campaigns for social, economic, environmental and gender justice based on the principles developed in the Kilimanjaro Declaration with 270 representatives of member organisations in 2016. For more information: https://www.africans-rising.org/.

2 The Institute for Popular Education (IPE) in Mali was connected to the 21^st Century Youth Leadership Movement in Selma, Alabama.

3 It was announced in December 2019, that the French company, Suez, was awarded a fifteen year contract to manage and distribute drinking water to 7 million residents in urban and suburban Senegal starting in January 1, 2020. Since January 1, water rates have been raised to four times the previous rate. At the time of this interview, FRAPP leader Guy Marius Sagna was in solitary confinement and a major mobilisation was being planned to support his release and the right to freedom of speech/protest. For more see link to FRAPP and to Koni Benson (2021 forthcoming) ‘Pan-Africanist organising against French (Neo) Colonial Rule in West Africa Today, An interview with Fatima Mbengue, Pathways to Free Education, vol.5.

4 The World Water Forum (WWF) brings governments, international financial institutions and UN agencies together with the world's largest corporations to purportedly solve the world's water problems. Many organisations and networks around the world have been working together for decades to denounce this powerful platform and its agenda of water privatisation. This interview took place after a three day strategic planning meeting cohosted by Africans Rising and the Blue Planet Project to work towards the Alternative Water Water Forum (in French, the Forum Alternatif Mondial de lÉau, FAME) to counter the next World Water Forum set to be hosted in Dakar in 2021.

5 The 4 million euro paid by the Senegalese government to host the water forum, represents only a fraction of the cost of the World Water Forum whose operational budget ranges from 13 million to 30 million euros – public funds that would go a long way towards addressing the country’s water access problems. A short video that captures this reality was made by local women organizing for water in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, and was screened at the alternatives planning meeting where this interview took place. It can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKR2YWfv0Ik.

6 https://djaramart.wordpress.com/patricia-gomis/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Koni Benson

Koni Benson is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa), working in the areas of gender, urban, public, and oral history. Her research is on collective interventions in histories of contested development and the mobilisation, demobilisation, and remobilisation of struggle history in southern Africa’s past and present. Her PhD drew on over 60 life narratives of women’s organised resistance to forced removals and for housing from the peak of apartheid to the present. Since 2006 she has been coproducing life histories of self-organisation and unfolding political struggles of collective resistance against displacement and for access to land and public services (such as water, housing, and education) in South Africa. These connections grew through the eight years she spent at the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG) doing research and education support work with trade unions and social movements. She is committed to creative approaches to history that link art, activism, and African history, and draws on critical approaches to people's history projects, popular education, and feminist collaborative research praxis in her work with various student, activist, and cultural collectives in southern Africa. Her writing has been published by the Journal of Southern African Studies, African Studies Review, Feminist Africa, Gender Place and Culture: Feminist Geography, Education as Change, South African Labour Bulletin, Zambezia, Khanya College Journal, Pathways to Free Education, ILRIG, Zmagazine, and newspapers in South Africa, Canada, Kenya, and Namibia.