Feminists

"I hope of course that the women will be inspired by the lessons offered by those who are walking the path with them, and that networks of solidarity and connection would develop from this meeting. Practically, I am keen to work on a publication that would capture the insights and wisdom that emerged from the gathering"

"I wanted to continue with school because my mother was denied an education and she always told us if she went to school she would have been a different person, so I talked to my dad and told him I can only go through the genital mutilation if he lets me go back to school."

"I could've easily given up but I didn't. All my breakdowns are breakthroughs. I believe I need them in order to push through."

"But when you give a girl an opportunity, she will never, ever embarrass you or let you down."

"I went through the genital mutilation not knowing what it was."

"I knew that I wanted something different. So, instead of focusing on being intimidated, I focused on education. I focused on going to school and making sure I stayed there."

"If you want to get married, you can get married. You have to choose to whom you get married and when the right time is. Marriage is a lot of work. But there is no pressure, the time will come, and there are a lot of men out there!"

"I was told it's what will make me a woman. I didn't know that it's something that is done very... it's horrible, you are cut, your genitalia is cut, no anesthesia, you bleed and some people die out of it."

"I'm lucky, I only fainted and came back to life."

"My education has enabled me to learn about it and now I stand against it and stand so that no other girl can go through that."

"There are many interesting initiatives being developed. There is a movement in several African countries to combat land grabbing. In many countries, there is a recovery of lands that were appropriated on a large scale. They are sabotaging activities, rejecting work and even sometimes destroying harvests. This is related to the idea that the government is not paying attention to the means of subsistence of these people. So they have to, basically, take care of themselves."

"For example, recently in Ghana, artisanal salt miners fought against a company that gained the right to exploit salt industrially in a large lagoon without paying attention to the people who, for thousands of years, made a living from mining artisanal on a small scale. This is one of the most recent interesting initiatives. Because of all these years of deprivation, small property owners are starting to organize themselves better in popular movements and are becoming more effective than they were."

"There is, for example, no system that allows women to be registered on land. But if we only do this, without paying due attention to credit and technology considerations, women will have rights to the land only nominally, but will not have them substantially. Therefore, it is very important to see that it is not just a punctual act, but a series of interconnected questions."

"However, some of these policies were very limited because there was talk of gender inequality, but women's rights affected many interconnected spheres that could not be separated. If one focuses solely on one aspect and ignores the rest, the rights of women will not be concreted."

"There are no policies that consider women as farmers. Then women are left aside and a cycle of disadvantages is perpetuated. It is not an economic question, but a matter of citizenship and rights. Anyone who declares themselves feminist cannot fail to recognize the connection between the rights of women and the right to the land."

"I believe that the land is connected with many fights. The main reason is that we are an agrarian country and the land is a crucial resource. For us, the land is identity, the land where we live is part of who we are. They may have political control."

"For a long period of time, I paid attention to gender inequalities. Many governments over the years have made efforts to address the inequality agenda with some success. In the anticolonial struggle in Ghana, women were very active."

"A system in which some people do not have full access, control or possession of the land can only be uneven. According to the law, everyone can have access to the land, but there is discrimination regarding how to access the land, which affects women, young people and immigrants as well."

"Most importantly: we have to support women in agriculture because many times they are not the only ones producing food, even though they are involved in all the productive activities that ensure the survival of the entire family."

"We also have to consider labor concerns in agriculture. Many workers received little and came to agriculture as a transitory activity, from which they had to be released quickly. We have to solve this. And there is also a need to solve the credit problem in rural areas. Many small owners have deaths and are very common in cases of suicide caused by deaths."

"In Ghana, women produce in their communities until they get married. To live with their spouses, they leave their communities and go abroad in the new community and access to the land is mediated by their husbands. Then, when women grow old, if they don't have any men, they can lose access to the land. If they get divorced, they lose it automatically."

"Due to him, in the first years of independence there were many social and economic public policies to support women. The government advocated universal education, for example, which ensured that many children went to school."

"But there is the mistake of deciding that it is not necessary to produce [other things] because, if you produce raw materials for export, you can earn enough money to buy food. So many farmers are not encouraged to continue producing and are not investigating how to produce, store, process and improve food security. Agriculture focuses on commodities."

"Without land control, women are second-class citizens. They also deny the right to work as farmers, because it is unthinkable to be a farmer without access to land."

"I believe there is a reason when we say that agriculture is increasing, but some of the most basic food security questions have not been addressed. In a country like Ghana, there are common illnesses related to food shortages and some people, at certain times of the year, do not have access to food. This is a very serious problem, particularly for children and women."

"Therefore, there are many complicated issues that we have to face to ensure food sovereignty. The first step is to guarantee the access of small producers to the ground for their own production, on the ground for the market. Secondly, we have to guarantee the questions surrounding the land posession. Some groups of farmers, especially women, cannot independently acquire land for agriculture."

"Africa is a continent of farmers, of small producers who do not have a vast production. Which doesn't mean that this is a bad strategy, because I believe that small-scale agriculture is promising and often undervalued. For example, Ghana has become a world leader in cocoa production based on small-scale agriculture. This should teach us that small farmers can produce successfully for the market."

"It was an important initiative because it opened up space for women to participate in public life. In the 60s there were many affirmative initiatives to ensure that women were represented in Parliament."

"We must center the voices and experiences of marginalized communities in our quest for social justice."

"Sustainable development cannot be achieved without addressing the structural inequalities that persist in our societies."

"Feminist don't only fight for their welfare but to make the entire society better, the only way to reduce the ill thoughts about feminism and it's goals is to encourage more young women to openly take part in the worthy cause."

"State's lack of attention to inequality and oriented petriachal rule as an underpinning viable that requires remedial action to provoke viable state society relations."

"Women are forgotten individuals with disproportionate level of income due to poverty and deprivation."

"The struggle for land is essentially feminist."

"Anyone who declares himself/herself to be a feminist cannot fail to recognize the connection between women's rights and the right to land."

"Women's rights affect many interconnected spheres that cannot be separated. If one focuses only on one aspect and ignores the rest, women's rights are not realized."

"All of us have capacity that can be built. We teach because we are building capacity we’re not the 'super knowers' but we do have certain experience, e.g how to do a survey or write a paper for publication and present it within 15 minutes. But the way in which capacity building is seen is very technocratic and Eurocentric in the sense that people all over the world have some of these 'hard skills', but they do them differently we may write differently, for example, but the standard for a journal article, supposedly international, is really Eurocentric."

"Step to the side or to the back. Allow the people for whom this is life and death to take the lead. We all live on this planet, need each other’s support."

"But it doesn’t always work that way. You have researchers on the British side who are invested, sensitive, humble enough to recognize the knowledge that is in Ghana. But it means that if the person applying for the funds has to be from the UK, or Germany you have to have that respectful relationship, or the Northern partner ends up dictating the process."

"And this has a financial cost as well. You’re not only not recognized, but the ‘northern researcher’ then has their name on the report, puts it on their CV when they’re applying for the next research grant. As we say in Ghana, you use fish to catch fish. And the person who was the ‘research assistant’ is nowhere, they can’t claim credit, they are losing money now and in the future."

"Just like with feminism, I would say step to the side or to the back. Allow the people for whom this is life and death to take the lead. We all live on this planet, need each other’s support. I’ve been supported throughout my life and career by people of different races, classes, genders. I would be lying if I said no, we can do this alone. We need support, but don’t want the white man to be the centre of the stage. Support us financially, give credit where credit is due – there’s power that comes with whiteness, and you have to acknowledge that. Say ‘you don’t need to invite me, I know this other person who would make an excellent lecturer."

"The African Studies Association of Africa: We’re still young – formed in 2013. The thinking behind this was that when African Studies became a discipline in Europe and North America, it wasn’t about centring African people’s lives; it wasn’t about how can we enable Africans to understand each other better. The agenda was how do we understand the natives so that we can better colonize them – to put it crudely, but realistically! The African Studies associations in UK, US, came out of that mould. They’ve changed a lot, but still don’t centre Africans enough – most of their members are not Africans, and the research is often about the researchers’ own interests."

"But there’s also the ‘soft skills’, which we hardly ever talk about. Capacity building is always two way. Someone may come from LSE to do a workshop at the University of Ghana to build the capacity of young PhD scholars on how to write for a high impact journal, but that same LSE scholar might go into a small community with a Ghanaian scholar and learn how better to sit with them and how you speak to the chief, how you need to drink the water, even if you think ‘wow, that is going to kill me’! How to do those things so that the community will embrace you – that is mega, but it doesn’t appear anywhere."

"If you’re not careful, a movement can lose its edge. Other people can appropriate it for their own careers, It becomes devalued."

"Two people could be doing research on slavery, but what questions are they asking? Somebody could map out where people go, how many people moved, do a nice quantitative map, maybe say how many people in North America are related to people in Nigeria, but it wouldn’t get you to the heart of what people are feeling today, to the injustice, to the issue of reparations. If we’re crunching numbers, how about we try and calculate the cost, including the psychological cost? Who would fund that if it was linked to reparations? I suspect it wouldn’t be seen as serious science."

"For what does it profit a man (and in this case by "man" I do mean a couple of biological and social males) if he is considered to be a superstar but does not invest in his intellectual DNA?"

"History should be taught from the kindergarten level, adding that the current practice in some tertiary institutions where students undertook history as a course for one semester “is not enough."

"I urge parents, teachers, and religious leaders to read about the country’s history and teach their children."

"I urge the Ministry of Education to make history a compulsory subject in schools. That would enable young people to know their true identity as Ghanaians and Africans, and empower them to become responsible citizens."

"We should let the children learn about our history so that when someone speaks an untruth about the country, they can defend with the facts. History should be a compulsory subject for all. If you do not know your history, you will not know your identity and the future."