This September, I traveled to Kenya on behalf of SISTA Fire to attend the African International Feminist Organizing School, or AFRO IFOS. I went because our work in Rhode Island is connected to a much larger struggle over care, dignity, land, gender freedom, economic power, and what it takes for our communities to live fully. I aimed to learn from organizers worldwide, deepen our international relationships, and bring those lessons home to our organizing.
AFRO IFOS, organized by World March of Women Kenya and Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, brought together more than 160 participants from 37 countries and across five languages to strengthen our international movement toward a feminist world. We stayed with the Maasai people, who kept us well fed and shared cultural practices.
When I arrived, I quickly realized I was the only visibly trans person present. Yes, it was a feminist convening, but I was nervous entering a space with women from all over the world, each of us coming with our own assumptions, cultures, and force-fed transphobias. So what else could I do but be my whole self?
It turned out I had no reason to fear.
Our sisters met me with love, joy, and respect. We laughed, learned, and shared stories about our organizing and the different contexts we come from. We struggled together through questions of political theory and unequal resources. We danced barefoot in the grass as we sang together in languages we do not share. And when I cried before my sisters, overwhelmed by the spirit of my African roots, they sang to welcome me home.
This spirit of connection nourishes Ubuntu.
Ubuntu was a central political concept of AFRO IFOS. It is a worldview rooted in southern African traditions that speaks to the interconnectedness of all people. It is often shortened to “I am because you are.” Kwezilomso Mbandazayo of JASS South Africa pushed us deeper: “Our condition for personhood is dependent on one another.”
We only become ourselves in relationship with others.
Across Africa and Latin America, our sisters and siblings are building power and creating alternative systems rooted in this spirit of Ubuntu. OFRANEH is organizing to defend the lands of the Garifuna people of Honduras. The Rural Women’s Assembly is cultivating food sovereignty through regional seed banks, sustainable agroecology, and women’s land rights throughout southern Africa. ABISA works transnationally from Senegal to Detroit, fighting U.S. deportations and supporting people as they reintegrate after deportation.
These campaigns and projects rely on deep communal relationships. Organizing a lending circle is much easier when people already know one another’s circumstances. Neighbors share cost-saving strategies because they have a vested interest in one another’s stability.
Here in the U.S., we face the challenge of an individualism that silos our problems, breeding isolation and division. We are taught to see our struggles as separate. Homelessness becomes a problem for homeless people. Abortion access becomes someone else’s fight. Representation gets reduced to skin color instead of a commitment to justice and equity.
Ubuntu recognizes that our lives are entwined. Systems that treat us solely as individuals fail to respect the communal truths and ways of being that Black, African, and Indigenous peoples have held for millennia.
Politically, Ubuntu challenges us to build systems that reflect our interdependence instead of individualism. It challenges us to practice the care and reciprocity that allow us to be our whole selves and grow together.
Because our sisters held us with care, I could be my whole self at AFRO IFOS. Because our kin showed up with honesty, we were pushed to see the connections between our struggles against patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. We are fighting toward a future where women and trans people have dignity and where all of us have our basic needs met. Ubuntu also requires us to honor our differences and move together through the contradictions between us.
One of those contradictions is Black Americans’ position in the global context of empire. We live in the United States, a country whose wealth and power have been built in part through extraction from nations and peoples across the world. Those of us born with U.S. citizenship also carry privileges that come with it. We benefit from English’s global dominance and from U.S. passports that make much of the world more accessible to us.
To some of our kin outside the United States, we can represent the empire’s power, status, and entitlement. We can also take up too much space in global conversations. At the same time, the complexities of Black American life are not always understood outside our borders.
My comrade from the U.S. had a very difficult time. She felt her experiences as a Black woman who had been trafficked and then imprisoned were being dismissed. She had the courage to name the tension of being invisibilized and abused in the United States, then feeling invisibilized again among other Black and African women. Through all the complexity of that conversation, she spoke a clear truth: “We face the same enemy.”
Our frontline is not ours alone.
Ubuntu demands that we understand our local fights as connected to global fights. Our sisters’ struggles in Brazil and Malawi are connected to what we face here in Rhode Island. Decisions made in the United States have consequences far beyond our borders, especially for women, trans people, working-class communities, and people living under the weight of U.S. economic and political power. We have to understand these connections so the liberatory alternatives we build here do not depend on the same systems of domination and extraction we are trying to change.
We are not alone.
SISTA Fire is part of a much larger global struggle to build communities and economies rooted in care and dignity for women and nonbinary people. Our responsibility is to do our part here at home. That means building real relationships. Knowing and caring for our neighbors. Understanding how our struggles connect. Resisting the individualism that teaches us to survive alone. Practicing interdependence as something our communities have carried for generations.
Relationships sit at the heart of transforming our current systems. Liberation has to move from theory into practice and from ideas into collective power.
As I prepared to leave Kenya, one song kept playing over and over in my mind. Our sister Gladys Branche taught it to us, a teacher and fighter for women in Sierra Leone’s trade unions. The song names that women are not defined by entertaining and serving men. It goes:
I was a dancer, but I dance no more.
I’ve made up my mind, I am ready to go.
We are destined for liberation. But we can only reach it together.
So sister, sibling, cousin, are you ready to go?
Will you come with us to freedom?
