Co-developing Local Feminist “Conceptual Vocabularies” While Strengthening Activism Through Critical Consciousness Raising with South Africa’s Mine and Farm Women

ABSTRACT This article is a reflection on five feminist schools, popular education platforms, convened between 2017 and 2019 with two women’s groups organising in the platinum mines in Marikana, North West and commercial farms in uMgungundlovu in Kwa Zulu-Natal in South Africa. The first part of the article looks at the background to the feminist schools and reflects on the composition of the groups, the self-selection of participants who attended the feminist schools, the co-development of a flexible curriculum and the non-hierachical dialogical learning methodology employed. The second part hones in on the use of local languages and how they enriched our conversations and encouraged full participation. Here we also highlight some of the translation challenges we experienced when dialoguing and drawing from concepts central in feminist theory, analysis and critique, e.g. patriarchy, power, gender. To resolve the challenges, direct translations did not work; we thus used multiple local concepts, and layered these with local expressions that the women felt were close proximates. We argue in this paper that to strengthen activist movements there is a need to think through our “pedagogy of mobilisation” and to co-develop local feminist registers and grammars and “conceptual vocabularies”. We thus make a case for the development and refinement of indigenous feminist theories/concepts that are locally grounded but outward-looking, drawing from and in conversation with local languages, realities and activists. We hope this paper adds to debates on feminist popular education and pedagogical questions in feminist activism.