Some dates the world celebrates loudly. Others have to be sought out, because they’ve never been given the spotlight they deserve. International African Women’s Day, marked every July 31, belongs to the second category which is exactly why Sarafina has chosen to make it our very first ground to stand on.
Few calendars mention it. Few media outlets talk about it. And yet that day carries one of the most important founding acts in the history of African women: the decision, made by women themselves, to organize among themselves, for themselves, on their own terms without waiting for anyone to offer it to them.
Dar es Salaam, 1962: The Women Who Took a Seat at the PAWO Table
Africa had barely begun freeing itself from colonial rule. Independence movements were unfolding one after another, borders were being redrawn, nations were reinventing themselves. But within this grand story of liberation, one question remained unanswered: who was thinking about the place of women in this new Africa?
It was this very question that women from across the continent decided to answer for themselves. On July 31, 1962, they gathered for the first time in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, French-speaking, English-speaking, Portuguese-speaking women alike despite language barriers and political differences. There, they laid the foundation for the very first pan-african organization dedicated to women, a full year before the founding of the Organisation of African Unity. It is this founding meeting that, twelve years later, would give rise to the International African Women’s Day as we know it today.
This story has names. Among the women recognized today as founding mothers and pioneering leaders of this movement: Aoua Keïta of Mali, a midwife, union organizer, and the first woman elected to parliament in what was then French West Africa, credited as the driving force behind the initiative; Jeanne Martin Cissé of Guinea, a leading figure of resistance against colonial authority who would later become the first woman to preside over the United Nations Security Council; Caroline Faye Diop of Senegal, elected to parliament in 1963 and later a government minister; Angie Elizabeth Brooks of Liberia, future president of the United Nations General Assembly; Maria Ruth Neto of Angola; Marguerite Adjoavi Thompson Trénou of Togo; Bibi Titi Mohammed of Tanzania; and Fathia Nkrumah, of Ghana/Egypt. Around them stood a crowd of delegates, activists, union members, and mothers whose individual names did not always make it into the history books, but whose collective presence gave the gathering its strength.
Their priorities were unambiguous: the complete liberation of the African continent, the elimination of apartheid, and the establishment of a justice system that would genuinely defend human rights. This was not a folkloric celebration they were inventing that day. It was a political act, in the fullest and most demanding sense of the word.
From the Conference to the Pan-African Women’s Organization: Dakar, 1974
That gathering gave birth to the Pan-African Women’s Organization (PAWO), headquartered in Bamako. It would take until 1974, at the organization’s first congress held in Dakar, for July 31 to be officially designated the International African Women’s Day a day now recognized by both the African Union and the United Nations.
Unlike March 8, celebrated worldwide and sometimes co-opted to the point of losing its political edge, International African Women’s Day remains a date conceived by and for African women, rooted in the specific historical and sociopolitical realities of the continent. That, perhaps, is what makes it all the more valuable in our eyes: it was never shaped from the outside.
Also in Edito: our launch editorial – FOR ALL. NO EXCEPTIONS!
Maputo, 2003: When the Fight from July 31, 1962 Became Law
It would take nearly thirty more years for this political struggle to be translated into a legal text worthy of its ambition. On July 11, 2003, at its second ordinary summit held in Maputo, Mozambique, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union adopted the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, now known simply as the Maputo Protocol.
This text went further than any regional instrument before it: civil and political rights, physical and psychological integrity, sexual and reproductive health rights, protection against harmful practices such as female genital mutilation, economic empowerment, and protections against the marginalization of women with disabilities, widows, and elderly women. The protocol entered into force in 2005, once it reached the required threshold of fifteen ratifications.
More than twenty years after its adoption, the record is mixed. The text has been signed by nearly every African Union member state and ratified by the majority of them. But around fifteen countries have still not ratified it to this day, and in several signatory states, commitments made such as Senegal’s pledge to permit medically supervised abortion in cases where the mother’s life is at risk, or in cases of rape or incest remain unfulfilled, held back by religious and conservative resistance. A signed text is not the same as an enforced one. This is one of the fights Sarafina intends to carry forward: not just ratification on paper, but real implementation.
What Has Changed Since July 31, 1962 and What Still Must Change in 2026
It would be dishonest to say nothing has moved since 1962. Rwanda today holds the world record for female representation in parliament, with nearly two-thirds of seats in its lower house held by women, a constitutional quota of 30%, set in 2003, that has since been far exceeded in practice. In February 2025, African Union heads of state adopted a new continental convention in Addis Ababa specifically aimed at eliminating violence against women and girls, reinforcing existing legal mechanisms.
But these advances, real as they are, should not obscure a harsher reality. Across sub-Saharan Africa, women hold, on average, only around a quarter of seats in local deliberative bodies, far from the goal of parity. According to UN Women, one in three women in Africa experiences physical or sexual violence in her lifetime.
Female genital mutilation affects nearly 230 million women and girls worldwide today, 63% of them on the African continent; in West and Central Africa, roughly one in five girls aged 15 to 19 has undergone the practice, and nearly a third of girls there are married before the age of 18. In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, rape continues to be used as a weapon of war, too often without a single woman present at the negotiating tables where peace processes that should concern them first and foremost are decided.
To this must be added a quieter, less visible form of violence: economic violence the financial dependence imposed by custom and tradition, so normalized that it becomes invisible even to those who live it.
International African Women’s Day : What Sarafina Refuses to Stay Silent About
This is why Sarafina exists. Not to commemorate a date frozen in the past, but to carry forward, through journalism, the work begun in Dar es Salaam in 1962: naming what must disappear, and demanding what must come next.
What must disappear: femicide, female genital mutilation, child marriage, domestic and sexual violence treated as ordinary, the use of women’s bodies as weapons of war, the exclusion of women from political negotiating tables, and the economic violence that too often goes unnamed.
What urgently needs to be established: universal ratification and above all, real enforcement of the Maputo Protocol; the concrete implementation of the new 2025 continental convention; political representation quotas wherever they are still missing; genuine protection for women’s rights activists, increasingly targeted for attack in several countries; and an education system that dismantles, from childhood, the norms that allow these forms of violence to persist.
Sarafina is not only a space for speaking out. It is also a space of memory and transmission. Because the women of Dar es Salaam did not simply protest, they built an institution, a framework, a continuity, despite all their differences. That is the legacy we intend to honor : a fight that organizes itself, that endures over time, and that is passed on.
For all African women and girls, this fight continues.
Pélagie BLEWUSSI – Founder & Editor-in-Chief of L’AFRICAINE
