Living While Feminist

Today on the podcast I’m speaking with Sara-Jayne Makwala King. Sara-Jayne is an award winning radio presenter, best-selling author, journalist, and public speaker whose career spans two decades and four continents.

She has an LLB honours degree from the University of Greenwich and a Masters in Journalism from Canterbury University.

Her first book Killing Karoline, published in 2017, was shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for South African Writing. Her second book, Mad Bad Love, was published this year, talks about the period in her life when Sara-Jayne had just discovered she was going to become a mother. Six weeks after discovering she was pregnant, her partner Enver relapses on heroin and disappears. Sara-Jayne checks herself into The Clinic and realizes that she must save herself to save her future child, and that part of this journey must be tackling why she’s always looking for love in all the wrong places. Both of her books deal with issues around race, identity, adoption, addiction, recovery, and mental health. Mad Bad Love is currently number one across many bookstores in the country.

Sara-Jayne’s daughter, is turning three this November. They live in Cape Town, where Sara-Jayne hosts her own weekend breakfast show on Cape Talk radio.

So today I’ll be talking with Sara-Jayne about parenting herself and her child, as well as addiction, adoption, and of course, feminism.

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Joy Watson. Joy is a feminist researcher and writer who specialises in analysing public policy and service delivery, as well as tracking funding flows from the perspective of building social equity. She has many years of experience in developing feminist responses to public policy and has worked on research Initiatives in South Africa as well as internationally. Joy is in the process of finalising her PHD on rape and public policy at the University of Stellenbosch.

Joy is currently Chair of the Board of the Women on Farms project and sits on the coordinating committee of feminists for social change.

Joy is also a writer. You can find her book reviews and reflections on life and its joys and sorrows on the pages of Daily Maverick Life. Together with Amanda Gouws she has co-edited the book, Nasty Women Talk Back: A Collection of feminist essays on the global women’s marches. And this year she’s published her first novel, The Other Me, with Karavan Press. The Other Me follows the life story of Lolly, who grows up in a context of trauma, violence and alcohol abuse – the effects of which linger long into her adulthood.

Joy is both a mother and a stepmother.

So today I’ll be talking with Joy about feminist parenting, public policy, and writing.

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Yewande Omotoso.

Yewande is an architect, with a masters in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel ‘Bomboy’ (2011 Modjaji Books), won the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize. Her short stories include ‘How About The Children’ (Kalahari Review), ‘Things Are Hard’ (2012 Caine Prize Anthology), ‘Fish’ (The Moth Literary Journal) and ‘The Leftovers’ (One World Two). Yewande was a 2015 Miles Morland Scholar.

Her second novel ‘The Woman Next Door’ (2016 Chatto and Windus) was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Literature Prize.

Her third novel is ‘An Unusual Grief’ (Cassava Republic), which is described as a ‘tender and essential meditation on the inheritance of loss’ and a ‘a bittersweet and gripping story.’ As one reviewer says on the cover fold ‘Omotoso’s prose is sharp and precise as it pierces the exterior and allows you to peel back the layers of humanity on the flawed and fragile characters in an Unusual Grief.’ The story details multiple forms of parenting and motherhood, as well as how at times we must reparent ourselves to become whole.

Yewande is the mother of twins who are two.

So today I’ll be talking with Yewande about feminism, motherhood, writing and unusual grief. Welcome Yewande.

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Wessel Van Den Berg.

Wessel is the father of two young children aged 6 and 8, and he sees fatherhood as his main job.

In his spare time, his curiosity about men and care has led him to work as a kindergarten teacher, counsellor, activist, and researcher. He works at Sonke Gender Justice and in this capacity has contributed to the establishment of the MenCare Global Fatherhood Campaign and the State of South Africa’s Fathers report series. He also led on Sonke’s advocacy for the prohibition of corporal punishment of children and the promotion of gender equal parenting leave in South Africa.

Wessel completed his doctoral study in 2022 about engaging South African men in a feminist ethic of care.

So today I’ll be talking to Wessel about feminist fatherhood and the state of South Africa’s Fathers.

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah. Nana is the author of The Sex Lives of African Women, which Publishers Weekly described as “an astonishing report on the quest for sexual liberation” in their starred review. It was also listed by The Economist as a best book of the year. She is also co-founder of Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, a website, podcast and festival that publishes and creates content that tells stories of African women’s experiences around sex, sexualities, and pleasure.

Nana is also a communications strategist who has over fifteen years experience of developing and delivering strategic communications programmes across media, public sector and non-governmental organisations. She has a deep understanding of digital technologies for feminist activism, and is widely recognised as a key African feminist working at the intersections of gender, sexualities and technologies. The impact of Nana Darkoa’s work has been documented by CNN in a film titled, Not Yet Satisfied.

Nana Darkoa’s opinion editorials and articles have been published by The Guardian, open Democracy and Essence. She has contributed to anthologies such as Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond as well as The Routledge Handbook of Queer Africa Studies. Her short stories have been published in It Wasn’t Exactly Love and The Pot and Other Stories.  In 2016, she won a prestigious Hedgebrook fellowship.

Nana Darkoa is a sought-after facilitator, speaker, and commentator. She has been a guest on several international media programs including being interviewed by Christiane Amanpour for CNN,  The Forum, and National Public Radio.

She holds a BSc (Hons) in Communications and Cultural Studies from the University of North London (now London Metropolitan University), and a MSc in Gender and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also a trained performance coach, and leadership trainer.

Nana lives in Accra, Ghana with her daughter Asantewaa, who is two years and four months old.

Today I’ll be talking to Nana about feminist parenting, her writing on sex and pleasure, and the Sex Lives of African Women. Welcome Nana.

Season 5 of Living While Feminist will be launching this August on the theme Parenting While Feminist! So looking forward to these conversations.

Take care of yourselves!

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Nyx McLean.

Nyx McLean is a trans non-binary queer South African, they use the pronouns they/them. Nyx is an academic who specialises in LGBTIAQ+ identities and communities, and their use of digital technology to form publics and counter-publics to resist the status quo. Nyx McLean is a Research Associate affiliated with the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, and is also currently the engagement editor of Makhanda’s Grocott’s Mail.

Their piece in Living While Feminist is called ‘The Agender Borderlands’ and in that piece they say:

I view being non-binary (and specifically agender) as a gift I walk this strange space of existence, it is often lonely but it can also be bright and glorious over here.

So today I’m going to be talking with Nyx about gender politics, finding home, and writing resistance.

Today on the podcast I have the absolute pleasure of talking again to Tiffany Kagure Mugo. Tiff was the very first guest on Living While Feminist, talking about her book Quirky Quick Guide to having great sex, cancel culture, and everything in between. Since then Tiff has given us a new collection, with her co compiler Kim Windvogel, called Touch: Sex Sexulaity and Sensuality. It came out this year from Kwela. As a piece in the collection by Zanta Nkumane says “The architecture of pleasure is expansive” and this collection certainly illustrates that well.

Tiff is still the co-founder and curator of HOLAA!! – a pan Africanist hub that advocates for and tackles issues surrounding African sexuality. She does ted talks and writing and just general amazingness all the time. She can often be found with a glass of wine, and, in my experience, can always be found with a joke. Earlier this year she was part of the Queering Belonging mini-series hosted by the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, and you can watch her episode online.

But the topics Tiff tackles (try that tongue twister after a glass of wine) are as serious as they are light – sex and sexuality remain taboo points of conversation for many of us. In a piece in March this year in the Mail and Guardian, Tiffany said:

Writing about sex, for me, has been a journey of learning and unlearning, turning things around in my mind to try to figure out how to do it. As someone who is a nerd at heart, I thought being able to understand the mechanics of the thing would help me do the thing. I was also under the impression one could crash course learning about sex.

However, the journey has been the equivalent of thinking you are digging in a sand pit and finding out you are actually in the middle of the Sahara desert. When I began, I thought that simply because I knew a little more than the average person about getting down and nasty I could enter this realm and document sex in all its glory. And for a while, as one of the few voices who had the gumption to write publicly about sex, the con worked.

Eventually, I realised that this was a marathon and not a sprint. I was always one article/sex story/radio interview away from talking absolute nonsense if I did not keep digging and furthering my understanding. When it comes to sex, sexuality and desire there is always something to learn, someone to learn from and something that has been a core part of your thinking that you need to put down and lay to rest.

So today I’ll be talking with Tiff about touch, sexual pleasure, and whatever else we feel like.

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Ziyanda Stuurman.

Ziyanda is a social policy, political science, and international relations graduate who currently works as a social science researcher based in Cape Town.

She’s a recipient of both the Chevening and Fulbright scholarships and hold advanced degrees in Conflict, Security and Development Studies from Sussex University, and in International Development from Brandeis University. Her undergraduate degrees in international relations and political science are both from the University of Stellenbosch.

Ziyanda has worked in various roles related to political and social science research over the past decade, and each of these professional experiences have informed her research and writing on policing and police militarisation in South Africa.

Today I’m speaking to Ziyanda about her new book – Can We Be Safe: The Future of Policing in South Africa. In the book Ziyanda explores the distant and recent history of policing in South Africa as well as some of the contemporary realities. It touches on colonial history, police brutality, inequality, the problem with public perceptions about crime and the misuse of this for political rhetoric, gangsterism and social order, the criminal justice system, and the ordinary lives of those who are affected by our crisis of policing.

The book suggests that things have not been working and will not work to make us feel safe and live safely, unless we imagine a new system entirely.

In the book Ziyanda says:

Inequality in South Africa is evident not only in who is policed and how, but also in the allocation of police resources. As it has always been in the past, the allocation of police resources does not always follow need … If we want to create a society that cares equally about the protection and safety of all communities, and a police system that responds with equal urgency and empathy for people regardless of their social status, then the horribly unequal state of affairs that we have right now in terms of resource allocation must be completely altered.

So today I’ll be talking to Ziyanda about her vision for policing in South Africa, her studies abroad, and her feminism. Welcome Ziyanda.