There is a lot of conversation in African feminist spaces about the significance of the Internet for connectivity and organizing. There is an even added significance with the rising platform changes, particularly regarding API access restrictions, as platforms start to prioritize an attention economy with often precarious consequences for activists and organizers. So, I have been thinking: as we begin to talk about creating safer, better, and more sustainable pro-activist internet spaces, how do we do memory work that documents the flows, timelines, networks, and contexts of some of our most transformative movements in a way that is sustainable and can be a resource for people, the ones coming after us, even outside of this platform?
Twitter, for instance, is an important embodied born-digital archive of African feminist thought. The last decade has witnessed several hashtag movements and transnational networks gaining visibility because of the platform’s affordances and, most importantly, because of the digital labor of African feminists. The question then becomes, if Twitter is no more tomorrow, how can we show the real-time liveness of movements like #SayHerNameNigeria or #WomensMarchZambia?
I got the inspiration for an archival home for hashtag movements that have emerged from Twitter for African feminists. The African Feminist Archive is a manifestation of that dream, a digital collection documenting feminist hashtag movements across Africa. This is a collaborative project to preserve the voices and digital labor of African feminist organizers who have used social media, particularly African Feminist Twitter, for social organizing.
This living archive seeks to capture both the immediate impact and afterlives of digital feminist organizing. As a core memory work project, it will document movements that may otherwise be lost to platform constraints and API restrictions, preserving not just social media artifacts but the context and lived experiences of organizers and participants.
Each movement profile includes organizer reflections, media coverage, timeline visualization, and network analyses. Highlighted collections will include movements such as #WomensMarchZambia, #SayHerNameNigeria, #TotalShutDownKE, #ArewaMeToo, and more. Beyond preservation, this archive will serve as a resource for activists, researchers, and students interested in African feminist organizing, digital activism, and social movements. Preserving these stories is a radical care act and labor of love for me amidst the threats of an unpredictable internet, and I am excited to see how it turns out.
