Feminist Cartographies in and Beyond Africa:
Redrawing the Maps of Women’s Freedom and Agency

In this lecture, I engage with cartography, both literally and figuratively. I examine it as a philosophical metaphor for thinking through the conditions of women’s freedom and agency in and beyond Africa.

Rather than treating maps as neutral representations of space, I approach them as epistemic and ontological tools that determine visibility and invisibility, center and margin, belonging and exclusion. I critique colonial cartographies of gender, which did not merely redraw territorial boundaries in Africa but also reconstituted communities by imposing Victorian domesticity, public/private dichotomies, and gender hierarchies that altered the meanings of personhood, power, and gender relations in colonial Africa.

I also examine the dynamics of enduring colonial cartographies that continue to shape women’s lives today. I argue that postcolonial patriarchal, democratic, militarized, and developmental frameworks have foisted mappings that largely preserve inherited geocodes, constantly reducing African women to subjects of policy, rescue, or inclusion.

Against these paradigms, I turn to African feminist thought as a practice of philosophical countermapping, showing how African feminist thinkers have challenged oppressive cartographies by reimagining freedom in relational, situated, and decolonial terms. African feminist cartography thus emerges not simply as critique but as a method of remapping literal and intellectual spaces. It aims to ensure that African women achieve visibility and to reconstruct the landscapes within which women’s lives become intelligible and livable.