I read the draft African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values the way you read a letter from someone you used to trust. For pages, I was nodding, smiling even. Then I reached my own body on the page, and I understood what the document had done: it had stapled together two tenets of my life that I thought could complement each other, so that to keep one I would have to surrender the other. I always thought my Pan-Africanism gave context and legitimacy to my feminism. This charter disagrees with that.

I am a Pan-Africanist. I am also a feminist. The charter is built so those two cannot share a room.