# Rachel Kagoiya & Anasuya Sengupta on the journey to DTI-EA and beyond

Episode 26 of Whose Voices? podcast | December 13, 2023
Rachel Kagoiya & Anasuya Sengupta on the journey to DTI-EA and beyond
Intro
Hey. Welcome to the Femininja Podcast. And in this series of podcasts, we talk about issues around detonating patriarchy. It's a learning space for becoming feminists. It's a takeover from feminists. We bring in different people, intergenerational issues. Rethinking issues around economies, rethinking transformational leadership. What does that look like?
We speak up, we speak up. We claim our rights. We are all about action and in doing all this. We don't forget to slay. And we are bold. We are fearless, we are unapologetic. We'll be inviting you to join us in our conversations together to detonate patriarchy.
Rachel Kagoiya
Hi.
Anasuya Sengupta
Hi, Rachel.
Rachel Kagoiya
Oh yeah, thank you. This is Rachel Kagoiya. I am an African feminist. I work with FEMNET. I am the Communications and Information lead at FEMNET, and I'm excited to be joining Anasuya Sengupta for this conversation. Hi.
Anasuya Sengupta
Hi, Rachel. I'm Anasuya Sengupta, and I am part of a feminist collective and global multilingual campaign called Whose Knowledge? which is a campaign to center the knowledges of marginalized communities or as we like to remind everyone, the majority of the world online. And it's such a joy to be back in conversation with you and to be in physical space with you, my friend.
Rachel Kagoiya
Aww lovely, lovely, lovely. We just want to take a down memory lane and start thinking about decolonizing the internet. Where did we start with this journey, both for FEMNET but also for Whose Knowledge? I think it's important for us just to keep going back in memory and just see where did we start lighting this fire? Because this fire is really lighting up and lighting up and lighting up, and very soon this bonfire will be lighting the continent and going beyond the continent from Africa to Asia across the various continents. And just thinking in terms of 2018, something was happening in 2018, Anasuya what was happening in 2018?
Anasuya Sengupta:
So much, my friend, so much. When Whose Knowledge? started as an idea in 2016 we launched at the AWID Forum in Brazil in Bahia in Brazil. And for those who are not familiar with AWID, it's an umbrella organisation called the Association for Women's Rights in Development, it's an umbrella association for feminists across the world, but particularly the Global South. And we launched at the time in Brazil because we knew that there was really no organisation of black and brown women from the Global South or of the Global South looking at the intersections of knowledge and tech justice and that were for and with communities and people's movements. So for those of us who co-founded Whose Knowledge?, because we came from the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, we were in a sense sort of sitting in the belly of the beast at the time, we were in Silicon Valley, even as a tech nonprofit, we were sort of looking at what the tech companies were doing around us.
And we had started sounding the alarm much before in many ways it became the thing to do, but that's always the case, isn't it? As feminists as black and brown feminists, we are the canaries in the coal mine. We sound the alarms, nobody listens to us. Then everybody else has to figure out something's wrong. And then suddenly they're like, oh, we should have listened to them. Or maybe they don't even say that, but we say you should have listened to us. But in any case, we started in 2016 and then we knew that what we wanted to do was to have, because we were a feminist collective, because we believed in a community led agenda, we wanted to bring together a whole set of amazing people to think about what an internet or internets that were feminist and anti-oppression and pro liberations would look like.
What would our internet look like? And at that time, as you remember, it was the time of the Fallists movements in South Africa, the student led movements that were protesting once again the forms of colonisation that were making life so difficult for young people, but people in general including around both fees but also Rhodes. The Rhodes Must Fall movement. So for us, when we said decolonizing the internet, unlike everyone who now uses that term as some shiny term that just feels like the brand new thing, including for instance, a whole group of people who now use it in a very blasé kind of nonpolitical way. For us, it was really embedded in the politics and the histories of Southern Africa in the politics and histories of Africa and in the politics and histories of the global south across the world of decolonizing, which many of us had come through our families and our histories of independence movements. But this was a new round of decolonizing that we were looking at. And so in 2018, the Wikimedia movement, which is the movement of Wikipedians and other advocates for free and open knowledge, met in Cape Town and we decided to bring these hundred amazing feminist community organisers, techies, journalists, scholars, academics together with wiki comedians to think about, to imagine and reimagine and design and redesign the internets of our liberations. And you, Rachel, were one of those fabulous people.
Rachel Kagoiya
That's true.
Anasuya Sengupta
So that's how it began.
Rachel Kagoiya
That's true. And actually for me, my memory lane, now that you mention it, I think I take it back around the same time because we were working very closely with one of our feminist partner, the Global Fund for Women, and they reach out to us and say, “we also have this feminist organization that's also convening around decolonizing the internet. Is it something that you have thought about or would love to think about?” And yeah, I think I remember when I read that email and I could connect, I could relate because when you talk about issues to do with knowledge justice, I think that African women, African girls, feminist and activists are constantly grappling with issues around being invisibilized, issues around not having our stories being told by ourselves, not having to wait for anyone else to tell our stories, but being able to be the ones to tell our stories our way.
And so being able to sit in there and also have that curiosity of saying, wait a minute, decolonizing the internet, let's go to Cape Town. Let's go and connect with this fabulous, amazing feminist and tech activists and start thinking, what does it even look like? What does it even mean? But being present in Cape Town, in this co-curated space, that was really powerful thinking around how we infuse the Ubuntu spirit because we could connect with ‘I am because we are’. And then being able to go back and say, when we go to look at the content, when we go for instance in Wikipedia, whose content is featured? Whose voices have been muted and whose voices have been preferenced? Whose reality is being invisibilized? And why? What's the agenda behind it? And so being able to be in that space and finding myself deeply, reflecting and thinking and saying, yeah, this is the fire that was lit for me in Cape Town, just being able to say, how do we keep fanning this fire until we are having these conversations, many conversations that then be able to multiply, multiply to the continent.
And my dreaming was for decolonizing the internet starting with East Africa, but ideally moving across to Southern Africa, to Western Africa, to Northern Africa, to Central Africa, to entirely DTI decolonizing the internet as a movement across the continent, but not to mention also the networking and the connections within the feminist and activists in the space. Some of them are amazing who we continue to stay in touch and just challenging each other and asking each other how do we make sure that our content, not just the written content, because we also appreciate and understand that most of us in Africa, we also have oral knowledge, which again is missing in the digital spaces. How do we even start thinking, bringing our knowledges in its diversities into a space that has been curated to take knowledge in one skewed format? So again, just thinking and reflecting and then come 2019 and reaching out to Whose Knowledge? again and saying, yeah, let's light that fire for DTI East Africa.
And we had amazing co-creation, conspiring with the host knowledge and the FEMNET team, and we were planning to have this DTI convening in 2020 and then boom COVID happens and we say, let's hold on, let's wait, let's see how it is. But COVID then came and reinforced the very things we're talking about because all of a sudden most of us were moved into the digital landscape, but it's a digital landscape that we had not even seen ourselves in the first place, a digital landscape that was not even created with us in mind, but this is what it is that we have to still go back. How was it during the Covid pandemic period for you at Whose Knowledge?
Anasuya Sengupta
I think it was really exactly as you said. On the one hand, as a team, we were used to being remote and distributed. So unlike a whole lot of others who were sort of panicking and trying to figure out how to be online in a way that was meaningful, that was the easier part for us because we'd always been online and distributed and across many different continents. We have folks from all the populated continents other than Australia, I think. And at the same time, exactly as you said, Rachel, it brought the starkness of the inequities on the continuum between the physical and the online worlds because there's no binary anymore of being offline and online. We are all in this hybrid space. And even if we are digitally unconnected, what happens in the digital world affects us, particularly those who are poor and marginalised in different ways.
And I think it's important just to remind all of us and those who are in this journey with us, exactly why we are using terms like feminist and decolonizing. Because the internet is not one of those fabulous sort of breaks with history as many people make it out to be this extraordinary technical innovation that completely revolutionizes the world. It actually is a continuation of the histories and the structures of colonial capitalism. And we see that when we look at some of the evidence, just as you were saying, Covid reminded us that nearly 70% of the world is digitally connected, most of us on the mobile phone because that's how most of us are connected. Some of us don't even realise we're on the internet because what do you get when you're on your phone? You get Facebook or you get Google or you get one other app, WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is probably the way most of us across Asia, Africa, and Latin America think of the internet. But we are connected. Three fourths of those who are digitally connected are from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands. 48% of all women are online. And yet the internet does not look like you and me. It does not speak our languages. It doesn't speak Kiswahili, it doesn't speak Kannada. It doesn't speak the over 7,000 spoken and signed languages in the world. And this is not a new thing either because knowledge has always been colonised. What we think of as knowledge has always been constructed or by always, I mean constructed in the 500 years of colonisation as being a hierarchy of Western knowledge versus all the rest of us. And our frenemies at Google did a really interesting research, right? Did some research a few years ago where they projected how many books had been published in the world and they projected that about 130 million books had been published in about, or mostly in 480 languages.
Guess which continent? Most of those languages came from Europe, the colonisers languages. And if you look at the fact that over 7,000 languages exist in the world, then just back of the envelope calculation, if you say language is a proxy for knowledge, which is true, right? It is. When you speak Kiswahili, you inhabit the world differently. That's true. You know the world differently than when I speak Bangla or both of us speak English. And so if you do just simple calculations, only 7% of the world's knowledges are in text, are in published material. Most of the world's knowledge is oral, it’s embodied, it’s visual, it’s tactile, it's gestural.
And so what is it that we are missing when we don't acknowledge the breadth, the richness, the texture, the layers of our knowledges? And then you come to the internet and how that applies on the internet. Just about 500 languages are on the internet as well. So knowledge or information on the internet is just about the same as what is on text because it's again the same digitisation process. What will it digitise? What exists, right?Not what it doesn't even consider as knowledge, which is our oral knowledges, our visual knowledges, our knowledges of gesture and embodiment. And then you come to Africa and you think about knowledge production in Africa, and I think you were at the DTI where we were talking about this and our wonderful compañera Kelly Foster, who is a public historian and is a black Jamaican scholar, was talking about just 1% to 2% of knowledge production in the world comes from Africa.
Rachel Kagoiya
Unbelievable, right?
Anasuya Sengupta:
And why is this? Because this is a continuation of colonial capitalism who leads and governs and designs the internet or produces the internet. 5% of leadership in tech is women, only 5% in the technology sector. The leaders of the technology sector are women. 6% of the workers at Apple are black. And it's even worse if you look at Facebook or Google, five companies in the world control most of the Internet's content and its infrastructures. And we know these, but I'll just name them just so that we are doing the walk of shame, like [how] we [as women] get slut shamed, let's do it back. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, GFAAM as they're beautifully known, right? And literally, if you look at cloud storage, so we can be using many different providers, many different services, many different tools, and we may have the illusion that we have some control over this infrastructure in that choice, including through free and open source software.
But if you look at storage, ultimately, where's our content being stored? Where is all this being stored? Where is even our code being stored? Just two companies, Amazon and Microsoft control most of the cloud storage. So what does this mean? When we look at the governance of the internet, which is through a complex dance permutation and combination of states and corporations and nonprofits like ICANN and IETF and ISOC, which are standard setting bodies, IETF, which is the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is a standard setting body for technical protocols. The last in-person meeting, which was just before Covid out of 1100 attendees, six were from Africa. And then they ask us why we talk about decolonizing the internet, this is why, this is what it means. And so Covid think brought that politics into such stark sort of visibility. No one could. So two things happened. I think one is that the inequities were really clear. The other thing that happened, especially for the feminist movement, and I'll say this with all the love I have as a feminist, as someone who's been part of the movement for many years since I was a baby, almost, the feminist movement also had to come to terms with the fact that tech, thinking about tech was no longer a luxury or something that could happen outside our usual conversations. When some of us as feminist techies started talking about how important it was that we had a feminist critique of tech in the early 2000s, we were a little too early, like organisations like Association for Progressive Communications, APC and so on, it felt like too early a conversation because people would say to us, oh, that stuff that digital stuff doesn't connect, it doesn't matter to us that we are not there. We are not doing that stuff. We on the ground fighting. And that was true at the time in a way but it’s no longer true.
Rachel Kagoiya
We can no longer…
Anasuya Sengupta
We do not have an option. All of our activism on this continuum between physical and digital has to be fought in all of these many spaces and the digital in particular because it has this kind of, oh my God, there's this kind of mythology around it, including amongst some of us that it's a democratic emancipatory space. And don't get me wrong, it could be, I mean it's brought us together. That's true. We've been doing all of our strategizing online. So there's a form of solidarity and community building and movement building that comes through the digital. And at the same time, we have to understand the underlying infrastructures and structures of power and privilege that are both historical and ongoing, that marginalize us, that reduce our agency, that control us in so many different ways. And so for feminists as well, I think we have no choice anymore. And that really, Rachel, I think became so evident in the last four years in the blur years.
Rachel Kagoiya
Yeah, yeah. And I agree with you completely Anasuya when you say as feminists, as activists, we have no choice. We have no choice but to continue applying our analysis of understanding power and surfacing how it is so imbued in the very structure that we say we want to use. We want to work, but there are certain things that still continue to hinder us from being able to exploit and to use this internet to its full potential because of those underlying power structures that keep showing up, that keep surfacing even in our work. I think I remember even for us during that Covid period for FEMNET when it had just begun in around that month of March, and we convinced sisters and we had what we're calling heart to heart conversations and we were saying, where does it hurt? How does it feel? How are you coping? How are you doing rafikis [friends]?
And it was hard. It was really hard for particularly frontline activists and feminists who are really at the frontline of the community grappling with so many things. At one point, we have a government that's trying to do some containment measures that are so exclusive, that are so non-responsive because of the diversity of women and girls talking about women and girls with disability, talking about how violence again was really, really, there was a spotlight of reminding us the magnitude of gender-based violence in our home. So there's this containment measure that requires you to stay at home to reduce the spread of the virus, but at the same time the home is not safe for you as a woman. And so that there's so many layers, so many layers that came from those conversations. But the greatest was also being reminded about how this message, about wash your hands or wear your mask or vaccinate or whatever it is, were being passed through gadgets and platforms, digital platforms, mobile connections, and then juxtaposing that to, who has access? Who has this mobile, who has this tool, who has access to the internet? Who has this even basic mobile to be able to receive an SMS? And so a lot of that being lost.
Anasuya Sengupta
And in which language.
Rachel Kagoiya
And the most important in which language, because again, most government responses, because we did an analysis around that time, most of the languages were just the main ones, the ones that monopolised most of the countries were the ones that are told.
Anasuya Sengupta
the colonial and dominant languages –
Rachel Kagoiya
You know, even in terms of even sign language. And braille came way, way, way, way after. So again, constantly reminding us what you say, that we have no choice, but we have to keep being vigilant and being at the fore of constantly reminding our governments and private sector and everyone else that is engaged, why is important to apply this intersectionality in every response, be it for Covid or whatever it is, even in our digital landscape. I think there's been a lot happening in the last two days because move from 2018 to 2019 to 2020, we're in 2022 and we've been part of this co-creation of the DTI together with Whose Knowledge? and we love calling each other co-conspirators
Anasuya Sengupta
and rafikis.
Rachel Kagoiya
And rafikis, and amigas. But just thinking about these last two days and probably also the four days because the Decolonising the Internet East Africa was organised, we agreed that we'll organise it around an event that's already ongoing. And this was the Forum on Internet Governance [FIFAfrica] in Africa. So that we have this space, this beautiful co-created feminist space for candid reflections and candid conversations around what it means for each one of us and what it'll take for us to start thinking about learners in the internet and be able to occupy and position ourselves within FIFA to listen to understand, but also to see what is it that we also need to invite FIFA to also start thinking about decolonizing the internet in expansive ways. I don’t know where you sit there Anasuya what's your feel as we think about DTI: East Africa, FIFA Africa?
Anasuya Sengupta
Well, you know I want to ask you first rafiki, because this has been your dream in many ways, DTI: East Africa, Decolonizing the Internet East Africa, bringing together East African feminists to have this conversation was your dream from 2018. So for me, I want to hear how you felt first and how it's feeling for you at the end of this week that feels like a lifetime already. How does it feel for you?
Rachel Kagoiya
Wow. Wow. I would say powerful, inspiring and ready. Powerful in the sense of every single person that we shared this space in the first two days and the wealth of wisdom and knowledge and experiences that we were able to share in that co-created space that we call DTI convening and align ourselves to probe, to interrogate, to ask ourselves, connect this, decolonizing the internet with the work that we do. The beautiful thing about the DTI is that we brought feminist and activists from East Africa, but we also had some from Southern Africa and a few from different countries,
Anasuya Sengupta
A few of us proxy African feminists
Rachel Kagoiya
And we also had a few African feminists, but close to 40 of us just spending that time together and thinking and having this, I don’t know how to call it an anger or fire, of being able to have light bulb moments and being able to say, aha, I know how this connects with my work when I'm working, for instance, with the community on issues to do with women's human rights. I see how this connects with the decolonizing the internet. I see the agency and why it's important for us not just to look at these tools as tools for sharing information, which is really important, but start thinking about the governance, start thinking about the infrastructure and the design of these tools and how we can position ourselves to continue influencing that they're inclusive, that they are intersection, that they are centering the marginalised communities in our societies. And so DTI for me was that powerful space for that kind of thing, but inspiring because then we then got to get into FIFA Africa and be able to see aha.
Now we see what we're talking about when we're saying wanted to decolonize the internet because it's an internet that was built without most of us in mind. And being able to go to FIFA Africa and be able to listen to some of the events and some of the conversations going there and say, oh yes, you are right. For instance, I remember attending this, I think I was sharing with you earlier, attended this event where we're talking about, for instance, Facebook who has community guidelines and being able to say that's the bare minimum Facebook can do is to make sure that it's in a language that is accessible to the many millions who have access to Facebook. But the realisation that even that bare minimum of the guidelines, the community guidelines are not translated in languages for the users, starts introducing the inequities and inequalities that exist within that kind of a platform that is supposed to be serving and being a tool and a platform.
And also now thinking about who is Facebook? I think now they are Meta and who is Meta and for them to do translation would be like a blink of an eye. I mean let's talk about it. It's just done. They just need to wave a wand and say “Is it translation? Is it over 7,000 [languages] done?” But what is that that has continued to stop again, bringing back the foundation of what you're saying in terms of colonial and capitalistic foundations of a lot of the work that exist even in this digital landscape. And so powerful, inspiring, and I would say ready in the sense of all of us being able to say there's more that needs to be done. Yes, we gathered a few of us, around 40, but there's a potentiality of us being able to reach to a few more and sharing with them this knowledge and being able to say it, particularly our feminist and activists from the Francophone or the Lusophone or our Arabaphone, just being able to again, reach out and start packing these conversations, this deep reflections of saying local content is important.
Yes, it's important for us to tell our stories. Yes, it's important for it to appear within the digital platforms, but let's go back fast to the foundation and being reminded of this famous quote about the masters tools never dismantling the master's house [by Audre Lorde], start even re-imagining and saying, does it mean that we really need to even get rid of it and start thinking alternatives and what even alternative looks like for me the last couple of days is what I'm sitting with and I'm processing with and it excites me and makes me feel ready to start saying there's a way we can in our collectiveness take on and challenge, but then again, still have our eye on that re-imagination of an alternative because isn't that what we always do as feminists? Keep thinking about alternatives, keep thinking about challenging the systems that are not working for us even when we're being told they're meant to be working for us, but keeping on challenging. Quite a mouthful, Anasuya, I don’t know, does this now give you an opportunity?
Anasuya Sengupta
It's such a flavourful, powerful mouthful. So thank you Rachel. I'm really glad that it meant all of that to you because quite apart from the way that we've been thinking of it and conspiring as we've been saying as Whose Knowledge? and FEMNET ever since I met you in 2018, I know you've been holding this close particularly, so it's really, for me, it's particularly moving to hear you feel how powerful it was. And for me as well, I think it was, gosh, I'm getting a little emotional thinking about this, but dream come true. It was so much so because it was, I mean this entire journey has been, it's just been such a short journey in a way for us since 2016, 17, 18, and also so many lifetimes packed into it. Especially I think Covid was a strange time of time stretched and compressed simultaneously.
Time meant very different things. And in our cultures, time does mean different things. We think both in linear and cyclical time we're much more adventurous about our notions of time. But I think for me, the most inspiring thing was to look at this room of incredible powerful feminists and to say that those who have been so-called marginalized and marginalized by historical and ongoing structures of power and privilege are magic. We are magic. Because you could see the power, you could see where the revolution is coming from. You could see that if we only had to center African feminists and other feminists from around the world at the core of the way the internet is produced, we would have such a different internet. I often use the imagination exercise. I often say to people, I think of it this way, if colonisation hadn't happened, Wakanda would not have been a so-called Afro future. It would've been an Afro past.
And, at the same time, I think one of the things for us to recognise as feminists who are challenging so many things simultaneously, the patriarchies within our own communities, the homophobia, the classism, the ableism, the elitism of different kinds, our states as well as corporations. Colonization then works with other forms of othering and privileges that our states and our communities also place upon our bodies and our minds and our souls, right? Decolonizing is really about decolonizing mind, body, soul and heart because the colonizer colonized our lands, our bodies and our minds. And so thinking about it that way and looking at this incredible range of feminists working across East Africa and other parts of Africa and some of us from the rest of the world, it just brought to mind for me that when you have the kind of solidarity that is solidarity in action and solidarity, that is underpinned by a deep, deep sense of political commitment to better worlds.
We don't even believe in one better world. We are feminists. We believe in the plural verse. We believe in plural possibilities and we are also very practical simultaneously. So we imagine, but we also act simultaneously because we don't have a choice and we don't want to wait. We want to seize the moment. So you can see from the kinds and the conversations that we've already been listening to from all the different feminists and that we will listen to from all the feminists that came to DTI, it basically says to me that if we have this kind of connective tissue that brings us together and a connective understanding about the ways that the internet is produced and the structures of power that produce it in this way, we can also start constructing these alternatives that you're talking about. And at the same time, and this is where I hope Ancestor Lorde will forgive me, but I think when I read that essay of her, I think to myself, I do believe she would understand what it would mean to be a revolutionary pragmatist or a pragmatic revolutionary that in tech we do have to understand the master's tools in order to dismantle the master's house.
It is not sufficient, but it's necessary. So we need both to understand the master's tools, be in the master spaces, challenge the master spaces, change the tools, and then bring that house down to create the, I don’t know, the extraordinary jungle of joy that we want the world and the digital world to be, right? So I think that that was what really inspired me, both at DTI, just watching everyone just come together in this kind of energy of possibility. And even when there was overwhelm, when we offered the data up and we talked about that this sense of hegemonic power, this almost absolute control over technological and social technical power. I think the thing to remember is if we just close our minds for a second and think our grandmother's time and today, how much have we achieved as feminists, right? We are our grandmother's wildest dreams and maybe some grandmother's wildest nightmares, but we have been able to make such possibility come true.
And so yes, it can feel overwhelming, but this is not just the work of one of us or some of us, it's the work of all of us. And so I think knowing the master's tools, but imagining a world in which we have just societies, societies of liberation for all of us, and whether that is physical, digital, a combination, a version of the world that we haven't even imagined before, a version that connects all of our world because here we are with a planet on the verge of collapse. So we also have to think about life and sentience in all its connectedness, that interconnected world, I think we can make happen. And honestly, both DTI and the way all of these fabulous African feminists showed up at FIFA. I could see that it would be possible.
Rachel Kagoiya
Another world is possible.
Anasuya Sengupta
Many worlds are possible.
Rachel Kagoiya
Many worlds are possible.
Anasuya Sengupta
Many feminist worlds are possible –
Rachel Kagoiya
Many feminist worlds are possible. And yeah, it's really a great honour, really when I think about it, we are part of that rethinking, restrategising and re-imagining that many other possible worlds, many other possible feminist walls and be part of that contribution to that creation. And I like something that you said about the tools because then it also introduces an aspect of saying we can also understand the tools at the same time, be able to create our own tools and be able to see what angles are we going to use this analysis of understanding the tools that are at work, but at the same time still have our own weapons of our own tools that we begin chipping away, begin thinking about bringing down this house with that hindsight of knowing that there are many other worlds out there. There are many other feminist worlds that are out there, and the possibilities are many. And we are not doing it individually, we're doing it collectively from our little corner. Amazing, amazing. Let's start thinking in terms of where do we go from here?
Anasuya Sengupta
I'm excited about that.
Rachel Kagoiya
What more can we think, can we call to be, and can we imagine moving forward from Decolonizing the Internet: East Africa?
Anasuya Sengupta
Well, I'm wondering how you are thinking about a game exactly, the feminist colossus, what does that look like? What does it look like to expand this conversation, to expand the actions across more of as you said, Francophone, Lusophone, Arabaphone Africa. What does it look like to you, Rachel?
Rachel Kagoiya
Like needs to be done immediately.
Anasuya Sengupta
No, going back to that clearly,
Rachel Kagoiya
No, going back to that clearly because we are on fire. But truly, truly, truly, I think it's been being able to keep this community that we, this fabulous, amazing community that we have co-created together. And we call it the DTI movement or whatever, what name we want to call it. But just staying in touch and being able to see how we continue to position ourselves to share with our communities, but also start thinking in terms of DTI, like I said, West Africa, DTI, North Africa, that will be an interesting one. DTI, Central Africa. And ultimately, like I said, it's just been having an army, an army within the continent of activist and feminist whose analysis has been rekindled because some of the DTI’s feminists were reminding us, it's like it's been there, but it just needed to be reignited, just needed a spark. And for some of us, it's just starting from way from just being able to connect. You've been doing some work of challenging and this kind of imagination, but you didn't have a name for it and then now you have a name for it. And so there's another renewal that is burst within you and the work that you continue to do. So whatever space we find ourselves, whether it's the regional, national, of the rebirth of the moment, but I feel like it's a moment for us as not just FEMNET, but everyone who we shared this space in the last couple of days should start thinking how we –
Anasuya Sengupta
I love that. I love that, that –
Rachel Kagoiya
Have this –
Anasuya Sengupta
I love that so much. And I particularly, I think as you said, that one of the things that feels most inspiring to me and I think came from those of us who are gratefully and happily proxy African feminists, those of us who came from Asia like I did, or from Latin America like Mariana or Claudia did. And for us, I think there's also the incredible inspiration that comes from knowing how powerful African women in tech are, and similarly for African women in tech to know their sisters and their compañeros and compañeras in Latin America or in Asia, to do this kind of connective tissue across the global south or the global majority worlds. Because I think we already know Europe and North America don't know how magic we are, but there's a way in which we ourselves don't know how magic we are.
Rachel Kagoiya
That’s true.
Anasuya Sengupta
And I think there's something very powerful about making that clear so that we can do more of this work and strategise and scheme in the ways that it can happen. I think both FEMNET and Whose Knowledge? are committed to this, and I think both of us think of this as practice, not a metaphor. There are incredible scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith who is a Maori scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand and Eve Tuck from Canada, from the First Nations in Canada, who say decolonizing is not a metaphor. And I think we have to remember that it's practice, it's about the practice of transforming, challenging, and then transforming these structures of power. And I think this is the practice, this is the feminist practice of solidarity, of feminist friendship that can help us think about this extraordinarily, this multi-headed hydra and take little bits of it and start shifting and changing it.
I think just the way that we showed up in FIFA did it. I mean, as you said, the way you showed up and talked to the Facebook Meta folks, I do my best not to say Meta because let's just keep calling them Facebook. The rebranding doesn't change what they do, but the way that you spoke, truth to power and the way that so many of us spoke, truth to power, that is what we need to continue to do. And we need to continue to educate ourselves and hold ourselves accountable as we do this work for ourselves and our communities. And I do think there's a way in which we can build the tools, the practices, because we already have the politics to transform what exists into something much, much, much better, much more just and liberatory,
Rachel Kagoiya
Decolonizing the internet is practice and it calls for intentionality. Its collective work. It's an ongoing practice. It's an ongoing work. Until we bring it down –
Anasuya Sengupta
Until we bring that master's house down; building that jungle of joy.
Rachel Kagoiya
Yes.
Outro
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us for the Femininja Podcast. We really believe and trust that you have enjoyed our conversations and they have pricked some thinking, some kind of wanting to find out more about feminism, about patriarchy, and what is the role for each one of us in detonating patriarchy and proudly and boldly claiming ourselves as feminists. So stay tuned, keep following us and engage with us on FEMNET website www.femnet.org
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