When plain-clothes police officers raided LGBT+ Ghana’s office in February, following media-incited homophobic rants, a group of queer Ghanaian feminists and feminist allies immediately organized to counter these attacks. Within a few days, the group announced themselves as Silent Majority Ghana— a group dedicated toand amplifying queer issues and sparking cultural change in Ghana. 

Digital feminist organizing by African feminists, as witnessed in Silent Majority Ghana’s work wasn’t uncommon. A few months back, feminists in Nigeria—in response to police brutality and following protests—coordinated #ENDSARS efforts to help the nation under their newly launched Feminist Coalition. Even further back, African feminists in Uganda, Sudan, and Nigeria had used movements like #FreeStellaNyazi, #JusticeforNoura, and #AbujaPoliceRaidOnWomen to call attention to the violence African women faced.  

African women and non-binary people have been using the internet to effect change. As a result, Africa’s digital feminist space has grown. Yet, just as it has grown, so also has the violence and digital harassment against them. 

A few months back, Fatima Derby, a Ghanaian feminist organizer who has worked with feminist groups like Young Feminist Collective Accra, The Gathering and Adventures Live!, was doxxed. An anonymous Twitter account had posted a picture of Derby and someone else saying there were the “two lesbians promoting an LGBTQ+ agenda in Ghana”. The account invited other Twitter users to identify Derby and the other person in the picture and share information about their home addresses so homophobes could find and assault them.

Galling as this was, it sadly wasn’t the first of its kind for African feminists on social media or even Derby, herself. “I’ve had countless experiences of digital harassment that have pushed me to take social media breaks and to fear for my personal safety and the safety of my loved ones,” she says. “At some point, I had to delete all photos of myself and my friends from Twitter to minimize our risk exposure.” 

As with many African feminists, a majority of Derby’s community work is offline, as the internet can be limited in scope and a number of African women still lack access to it. Yet, the organizer has also found the internet beneficial to boosting the work and learning from other queer folks and feminists. 

Nigerian feminist, Karo Omu, founder of Sanitary Aid NG, has seen how digital activism can help bolster grassroots work. Omu’s work initially sought to address period poverty in IDPs within Nigeria and its borders, but quickly grew to involve the entire nation upon seeing the gravity of the lack. As of 2020, SANG helped over 20,000 Nigerians struggling with access to sanitary products. “The digital space has been very impactful to my work but it can be challenging when you’re exposed to interactions that reflect a lack of empathy for the most vulnerable around us.”

As with Omu in Nigeria, in Kenya, Social media has been central to helping the Trans and Queer Fund Kenya team make calls for monetary and non-monetary donations, boost and manage requests for support, and learn from other mutual aid organizations. Beyond money and learning opportunities, social media has also made it possible for intercontinental digital organizing between African feminists on the continent and African feminists in the diaspora. Asamoah of Silent Majority Ghana says, “Because we are a multi-national group, digital organizing has been critical to helping us to ‘meet’ digitally and also to engage with queer and ally communities in Ghana and across the continent. The physical locations of members aside, digital organizing has provided a measure of safety for our members in Ghana who are at risk of state persecution for advocating for queer rights or being assumed as queer.” 

However, digital African feminist work is threatened when the feminists and feminist organizations behind them are unsafe and at risk due to digital harassment that threatens to run them off these platforms. Mumbi of Trans and Queer Fund Kenya who has been subject to all sorts from unwanted advances by men trying to humiliate them knowing they are queer describes it as “This (Digital harassment of African feminists) is about bigots usurping public space with social media being a final frontier in a country (Kenya) and continent where there is a serious anti-feminist resurgence and sustained attacks on queer and trans people. It’s about removing us or denying us of the opportunity and space to even make clear that we are living in despair.”

Rosebell Kagumire, journalist and founder of African Feminism, bears witness to this. “The harassment is very real. We see it online just like it happens offline. there is an attempt to discredit African feminists and harass them into oblivion by making up false stories, framing, trolling, and even sexual harassment.” She continues: “You are attempting to make change and shift the ground and that threatens many people be it misogynists, racists or even people who look like you.”

Kagumire touches on an important point. Whilst a majority of the trolling and violence has come from outside the community, there have been instances of intra-community violence. Derby says, “Some of my harassment has come from other African feminists as well. It is important to name this because sometimes we unwittingly contribute to harming each other by how we choose to engage online.”

In response to multiple callouts about cyber bullying and harassment, social media platforms have built tools to report harassment. But these tools fail when met with cultural nuances as they are built around digital harassment as understood within a western context. “Aside from better reporting mechanisms and better rules, social media companies need to hire more staff who are able to understand the unique languages and dialects from other parts of the world. For instance, harassers can escape consequences by using pidgin as opposed to standard English,” shares Asamoah.

Neema Iyer, founder of Pollicy Org and Women’s Safety Expert at Facebook agrees with Asamoah. The tech policy expert suggests that transparency of social media’s community policies, better understanding as well as simplification of the reporting processes would help mitigate the digital harassment African women face online. “Besides the cultural context barrier to reporting harassment, the rules governing shadow banning are unclear as users who post anti-colonialist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic content are usually more susceptible to it (shadow banning). Tech companies need to move with a sense of urgency (referring to the hours and days it sometimes gets to get a response when you report targeted harassment on social media) and transparency to address issues of digital harassment.” 

Social media companies are starting to build infrastructure within the continent. TikTok, still within its early days, has partnered with platforms on the continent. Twitter also announced in April that they were launching a Ghanaian office. Some Africans considered the Twitter announcement a sign of opportunities to come within the continent. Others worried that in light of Ghana’s intensified anti-LGBTQ movements, Twitter’s statement about Ghana being a nation that embodies freedom and growth were tone-deaf and a foretelling that the company wasn’t about to dedicate efforts to weeding out abuse that looks different but still similar to what happens in the west. (A representative of Twitter could not be reached for commentary). 

Still, African feminists are seeking to address this harassment. Nigerian feminist and international lawyer, Moe Odele, instituted a #StopTwitterHarassment day on April 9th in light of the increased digital abuse she has suffered since getting increased attention for her legal work with the #EndSARS protest. Kagumire says, “we must take this harassment seriously. We have a tendency to reduce this as simply being online but as we get increasingly online, this is having real life consequences on our mental health and well-being.” 

With this being the reality, it’s clear that an African feminist future can only exist if the safety of African feminists, online and offline is prioritized.