Opening notes

3 August 2020, different time zones, Jitsi video call

Hiiiii… how are you doing?

Hey friend!

[three or four minutes of catch up hyping each other up] [two or three people trickle into the call]

I’m doing okay… excited…

Hey… hello? Can you hear me? Oh hi everyb— Hey, how are you guys

doing? Yeah, I’m also a bit curious about how this will go…

We can hear you!

[Twenty five minutes later, finally, finally, we were all here ]

I think we lost them…

Where’s Makgosi? Let me text her…

We were on Jitsi, a free and open-source video meeting space, for the first feminist learning circle. But even though all of us had either recently started or had long been working from home, Jitsi was new to us, so other suggestions for our future meeting spaces floated about… Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, can we handle yet another messaging group in our lives, too?

It was overwhelming. It was exciting. It was brand new and, at the same time, old as our ancestors’ bones.

Care work in capitalist societies has always been undervalued and erased, a kind of violence that feels heavier and more amplified — some of this weight is distorted, some of the ruckus is already familiar — during a pandemic. As Jenny Yi-Chen Han and others have noted, Covid-19 has shown us how deeply we are in a crisis of care.

The first edition of the MFI Africa e-zine, an experiment in creative rapporteuring, was a curation of profiles of feminists and feminist movements from different parts of Africa and its diaspora. We published it in the early days of the pandemic in Africa, knowing full well it was a fantastic but unfinished project, an archive in motion. In this edition, we centre the process of thinking towards models of care and repair. We know that there is always more – so much more – to say and do about our lives and afterlives at the intersection of African feminisms, movement-building and accessible and inaccessible technology, and we wanted to see where more extensive conversations could take us when we turned towards our political blindspots, tended to our vulnerabilities with collective care and, with a whole lot of help from our friend and artist, Tiger, explored our creative curiosities through collage.

This edition is therefore a tentative experiment with knowing and unknowing and not-knowing, with form and colour and technology, with ourselves and now, with you. Every week for two months, we gathered around a web of screens, servers, new and old friendships, music breaks and something like a syllabus, but not quite. In these learning circles, we talked about how the internet is as brilliant as it is monstrous; how it felt like it gave us a way into so many worlds, and how, in order to do so, it must eat the world first. Put differently, the internet is modelled after some kind of humanity, and that’s exactly the problem, no? Ruth especially emphasised the destructive nature of large-scale resource extraction under capitalism, and in her provocation, she challenges us to imagine what conditions are necessary to support an internet that does not depend on the exploitation of people, land and territories.