Feminist Africa has released Volume 7, Issue 1, a special commemorative issue titled “Twenty Years of the African Feminist Forum.” First published in April 2026, the issue honors two decades of the African Feminist Forum (AFF) and the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists, the movement-building framework born out of it.

Feminist Africa is the continent’s peer-reviewed journal of feminism, gender, and women’s studies, produced by and for a transnational community of feminist scholars and activists. Now based at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, the journal has long served as a platform for intellectual and activist research on the shifting realities of post-colonial Africa. This landmark issue was guest-edited by Sylvia Tamale, with Akosua Darkwa serving as focal editor.

In her editorial, “Alive and Growing: Twenty Years of the African Feminist Forum,” Tamale reaches for the image of the baobab tree to capture the AFF’s endurance — resilient, deeply rooted, and still very much a political force two decades on. The issue, she writes, exists to honor that legacy while pushing the movement to look ahead and reimagine feminist futures.

The rest of the issue unfolds as something between an archive and a family reunion. Pioneering AFF figure Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi opens with a candid feature tracing the movement’s bumpy road from early planning meetings in the 1990s through the fraught 2003 Zanzibar gathering to the AFF’s eventual founding in Accra in 2006, a piece that doubles as a rare account of how feminist spaces can fracture, and how they can be rebuilt. Fatou Sow follows with a feature interrogating how “culture” has been mobilized across African constitutions and politics to constrain women’s autonomy, and what it means to reclaim it. Nancy Kachingwe contributes a standpoint essay situating Pan-African feminism within today’s landscape of neo-imperial pressure.

Two in-conversation pieces widen the lens further: Hope Chigudu moderates a freewheeling exchange among members of the pioneer AFF Working Group, while Jackline Kemigisa leads a conversation among younger African feminists reflecting on the Feminist Charter’s relevance today. Profiles round out the issue’s movement-building focus, including Sarah Mukasa on the Uganda Feminist Forum, a joint piece by Maame Akua Kyerewaa-Marfo and Maame Adwoa Amoa-Marfo on Ghana’s Young Feminist Collective, and Jaimee A. Swift on the African Feminist Ancestors Project, a collaboration between the AFF and Black Women Radicals.

The issue also carries poetry from Wana Udobang, vangile gantsho, and Coumba Touré; a review by Lamyaâ Achary of Jessica Horn’s African Feminist Praxis: Cartographies of Liberatory Worldmaking; and tributes to two members of the pioneer AFF Working Group who died in recent years: Bene Madunagu, remembered by Iheoma Obibi and Solumfeechi Odinkalu, and Everjoice Win, remembered by Ennie Chipembere.

Feminist Africa Volume 7, Issue 1 is available to read for free on the journal’s open-access website.