Peeling Away at Patriarchy: Prof Mahmood Mamdani on Scholarship as Activism

Matri-Archi(tecture)

Welcome to our Peeling Away at Patriarchy series, which seeks to contribute to the equality that feminism stands for by letting you know compadres and allies in privilege positions who are contributing to transformation and intersectionality in spatial discourse. We obviously aim at making the spatial links, revealing and sharing discourse so that the development of our situated knowledges can take effect in the spatial form. To inaugurate our Peeling Away at Patriarchy (PAAP) we are featuring Professor Mahmood Mamdani. An inspirational Ugandan academic, author and critic whose thinking speaks to the intersection between politics and culture with critical explorations reimagining colonial normative entities. This PAAP aims at emphasising that the power of intellectual sharing and acting is of great importance today, and should be practiced with caution. Collectively, as Africans, we have the ability to emancipate our local ways of understanding the world (past, present and future) in various mediums suited to supporting the value of situated knowledge. The aforementioned, all in pursuit of developing to not only breathe freely, but to live and navigate unimagined realities. This speaks directly to the inherent phenomenology that we have as humans, in whatever form we decide it to be. This humanly tendency to phenomenology is contravened through historical injustice and continues to be fettered by oppressive institutions. This episode is narrated and written by Khensani de Klerk; originally published as an article on March 14th 2018.