"Women Leading Africa: Conversations with Inspirational African Women" is a collection of interviews with women leaders from Easter, Western and Southern Africa. In this collection, these leaders share their inspiration, thoughts, and experiences on feminism, politics, peace building, leadership and the Arts.
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is a Ghanaian feminist writer and blogger. She co-founded award-winning blog Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women and has written for The Guardian and Open Democracy. Sekyiamah is the Director for Communications manager at the Association for Women's Rights in Development and a member of the Black Feminism Forum Working Group which organised the historic first Black Feminist Forum in Bahia, Brazil.
Issues of women, the world over, are peculiar for its similarities than its differences. The issues confronting women are not specific to any given culture, continent, country or even ethnic grouping. They are colour blind, nonracial, and ageless. They are ubiquitous. Even in the so-called developed countries where the fight for gender equality has been fought and achievements chalked to such an extent that it (gender equality) has become commonplace, one could easily point to certain discrimination against the fair sex; nevertheless, the intensity - depth and width - of this discrimination varies across cultures. Because these problems emanate from an established patriarchal society, they are structural in nature and, when not interrogated and challenged, are bound to be propagated from one generation to the other, even by individuals who have no intention of maltreating women or discriminating against them; for no one is explicitly tutored to hate women. They are only asked to implement what the traditions - developed by a council of men - stipulate. So that, at any point in time, the victims of such eolithic laws are themselves its ardent adherents, perpetrating it with ardour and tranquility with the belief that they are advancing some ancestral course. For instance, widowhood rites are mostly meted out to women by women; so too are some instances of clitoridectomy, or FGM (Female Genital Mutilation).