Indigenous Women’s Platform

Championing Indigenous Women’s Leadership

For a long time, Southern African Indigenous Peoples have lacked a sustained, robust regional presence through which they can engage with their unique challenges and resource needs and advocate for their rights and priorities. The UN Special Rapporteur Indigenous Peoples reports from Namibia (2013), Botswana (2009) and South Africa (2005) highlight multiple overlapping issues which Indigenous Peoples – and Indigenous women particularly – face, such as lack of recognition, dispossession of land and natural resources, denial of access to benefit sharing of resources and lack of access to justice are a major experience and human rights problem for Indigenous Peoples. For Southern African Indigenous women, these issues are compounded with various gender-specific challenges. In many cases, Indigenous women across the SADC region continue to experience systematic marginalization, political exclusion and gender-based violence. Indigenous women in the region have consequently been left at great risk and without effective and lasting interventions. 

ACRRA recognises that these marginalised and excluded Indigenous communities hold generational wisdom on how to live sustainably with our earth. Indigenous knowledge- which Indigenous women play an integral role in preserving- carries the answers that the world is seeking in our efforts to address the adverse impacts of human-induced climate change. Indigenous communities’ practices offer desperately needed approaches to stewarding the earth, protecting and restoring biodiversity and living sustainably for the benefit of people and planet. Recognising Indigenous Peoples, the role of Indigenous women and their rights to land and resources is therefore not only a matter of human rights but an essential component of addressing the climate crisis. 

ACRRA’s Indigenous Women’s program responds to the need for a Forum led by Indigenous women for Indigenous women. The initiative is rooted in Indigenous values and aims to create a supportive, robust network offering wellbeing, technical and legal support across the region to address shared and overlapping struggles across Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. The vision of the program is to anchor within ACRRA a forum that recognises and amplifies the role of Indigenous women as traditional knowledge holders who are uniquely positioned to bring healing after generations of trauma experienced by their communities at large, and by Indigenous women and girls in particular.

Indigenous Women: Wellbeing and Healing

The concept of Indigenous Peoples within the African context is based on human rights. When communities identify as Indigenous Peoples, they are making a specific claim about their lived experience: namely, that their communities have been, and continue to be, subjected to a high level of discrimination and dehumanization intrinsically linked to their identity, way of life and culture. Indigenous Peoples experience this subjugation at the hands of initially colonialism and that legacy continues through other dominant groups in the post-colonial era. This has involved material destruction – including the dispossession of their lands, resources and livelihoods – as well as identity erosion, which takes the form of forced assimilation, bullying and taunting, destruction of culture, and the imposition of a status of inferiority on their communities. Consequently, Indigenous Peoples face a deep spiritual and identity crisis, externally imposed shame, and corroded self-esteem. A holistic approach to Indigenous Peoples rights combining spiritual healing and the restoration of resource rights  is crucial.

The Indigenous Women’s program recognises the importance of spiritual restoration and healing as components of addressing the widespread human rights violations suffered by Indigenous Peoples. The program aims to form an Indigenous Women’s Forum hosted by ACRRA–comprising activists, youth, psychologists, and Indigenous members across the Southern Africa region – which will supplement the resource-rights focus of ACRRA’s work with a program primarily focussed on wellbeing and healing. This will also reinforce the role of Indigenous women as primary knowledge holders and transmitters.