#MenAreTrash. #AmINext? #SayHerName

Located primarily in Southern African contexts, but with global relevance and resonance, this rich and nuanced perspective on gender-based violence addresses brutal and everyday male violences against women, children and the LGBTQ+ community, both institutionalized and interpersonal, through the productive lens of contemporary Digital Black and African Feminisms. Calling out the silencing of violence against Black and African women in particular, the book disrupts such erasures and plays witness to such violences. Rather than repeating tropes of damage and victimhood that African feminists have called out, the book also speaks to activisms and agencies, particularly as articulated in contemporary virtual spaces. In this way, the book raises and challenges the ongoing and silenced violences against Black women — remembering, mourning and bearing witness to these — while also protesting against them and the conditions that make such violences possible and imaginable. Importantly, the book, as all feminist scholarship hopes to be, is both political and personal. It works not only with dense theory and literature, but also with embodiment, affect and lived experience, memory and subjective narratives. Indeed, Kutlwano Mokgwathi's beautifully articulated narrative is stitched through with rage, grief, and other entangled affective engagements. What most stands out for the reader is the way in which this powerful and valuable account of contemporary African Feminist Digital activism, weaves both a despairing and reparative or hopeful narrative, what the author calls ‘respair’: we are reminded to remember the violated and dead, to ‘name’ violence, resist forgetting, to ‘disrupt’ denial, whilst also to ‘mobilise’ against systemic and interpersonal violence, and to engage creative and radical ‘reimaginings’, through reflexivity, care, solidarity and love.

Tamara Shefer

Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies

University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Dr. Mokgwathi provides a valuable addition to the literature on feminisms and socio-political challenges in Africa. By centering the longue durée of patriarchy in Africa, particularly the impact of colonialism, and placing digital feminist/womanist activist organizing in their historical context, she offers a thoughtful examination of “the routine violence that structures women’s lives." Mokgwathi’s book contributes to our understanding of how the past has shaped contemporary feminist and womanist movements in Africa in an increasingly digital world.

James J. Fisher

Researcher, Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life

Tufts University