“I think it's important to hold each other with grace in our healing process” - Lorato Palesa Modongo (Botswana) 5/5

This is the fifth and final part of our conversation with Lorato Palesa Modongo, African feminist and psychologist from Botswana.

We have explored Lorato’s early feminist awakening (Part 1); her education and experiences as a social psychologist (Part 2); her thoughts and experiences in African feminist movements and spaces (Part 3); and her observations on the tensions that sometimes hinder intergenerational African feminist movement building, as well as possible solutions to bridge the gap (Part 4). In this last part, we discuss personal and collective healing to support our movements, Lorato’s current work with the African Union and her journey towards self-reconciliation to unearth her vision of herself.

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Every time we get together in feminist spaces and the issue of intergenerational movement building comes up, it's always that same cycle of blame, and the conversation hasn't really moved from that point towards solutions. What would that step look like in your own thoughts and based on the experiences you have had?

I think for me it is firstly, trying to understand. If we get to the ‘why’, we will understand that it becomes the issue of agency, self-determination, and using what you have in that moment. If we go to the ‘why’ we will see that the conversation is bigger than just us being deliberate about thinking that the other group is inefficient or to blame. We will find that there are other interconnected things in the background. After the untangling, I think it's important in our healing process, to hold each other with grace. Lots of grace. I am really lucky that I've sort of been in spaces where there's lots of grace; where even if I've made a mistake, there is grace.

This grace will actually allow us to forgive, because moving from blaming also includes acknowledging and forgiving. Sometimes even when there's not been any ask for forgiveness, you forgive, you give grace, and you chart out new paths.

“After the untangling, I think it’s important in our healing process, to hold each other with grace. Lots of grace. ”

Let the conversation be, “why are they not giving us space?” Then we arrive at: ‘they're not giving us space because they were socialized in a society that believes that when you are young, you don't know anything’. Because that is how they grew up and influenced their processes. Nobody listened to them when they were younger. Even subconsciously, they still hold the trauma, and it comes into the spaces that we engage in.

So, we can hold the wonder of the knowledge and all the immense work that they have done, while we also hold them as these people who are also untangling the complexities of their lives. And they just want what we all want, which is freedom and emancipation. I think that's what it looks like for me.

What opportunities do you see or what opportunities can we create to now facilitate this healing, this forgiveness, this creation of space for grace and then moving forward towards liberation?

Mentorship! I think mentorship presents a big opportunity. And I’m talking about deliberate mentorship where we can get to hear each other's stories even on a personal level. I think there's something that humanises somebody when you get to hear their story. We can create different platforms where we can be mentored. Also in mentorship, it's not just the older person filling you up. You're also filling them up.

Secondly, I think there's so much opportunity for documenting. We all need to document, do archiving work, memory work, go back to our communities and engage with those older women and write whatever they're giving us down. Let's digitise it. Let's thrust it into the spaces so that people can engage with it. Let's form partnerships with memory institutions in our different countries, in different communities, to see how we can amplify the work that's being done by these memory institutions.

I think there are many opportunities, but there are also opportunities for funding. How can we make collaborative spaces where we are funded to realise all these things that we're talking about? We always leave the issue of funding behind. If you don't have access to funding, you’re probably not going to do a lot of work, particularly in the current economy. It is a conversation that needs to be had. How do we ensure that? How do we compensate these voices that we say we want to legitimize as well? Because I don't think speakers in the Global North speak for free, right? So, my grandmother, when she's teaching me things, why can’t she be compensated for that work? That's part of the work of legitimizing people's voices and knowledge systems and the knowledge production.

Tell me about the work you're doing currently in Burkina Faso and how it fits in with your feminist journey, and all of the things that we've been discussing.

I'm currently with the African Union Center for girls’ and women's education in Africa, AU/CIEFFA. Their headquarters is here in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. I'm currently the Gender Research Analyst. So, in terms of the policy work that's being done here, we look at the numbers and look at the qualitative data on girls' education in the continent. What are some of the patterns and trends that we're seeing in order to put that into policy when we are strategising on governments’ need to invest in girls’ education in Africa?

We also know the issue of data in Africa. We don't have access to reliable, consistent data. So, we can’t paint a real and true picture. But now we say, in the absence of statistics, the qualitative narrative counts. What are the voices of the people on the ground? How can we amplify these voices to make a case for governments, for member states to return girls to school? That's the work I'm doing.

You’ve only been there for a year or so. Have you found feminist space there?

I don't speak French, so it's really difficult to authentically connect with people here because it is a Francophone country. Language is such a powerful tool, not just for communication, but also for community. So unfortunately, I haven't been able to do that yet.

We are getting close to wrapping up. Are there things that you wanted to share that we haven’t touched on?

Yes, I think in the discussion of intergenerational feminism, there's a lot of collective healing that needs to happen. There's a need for collective rest, collective joy, and collective love as well. And what does that love look like? It means love for community and love for self, because love for self includes things like discipline, integrity, accountability, and being guided by ethical feminist principles. And I know that we define these for ourselves, but there's also a need for collective definition of the feminist principles that guide us.

And I want that soft landing for all of us. I think we deserve to glow. We're fighting but we are glowing because there's joy, there's love, there's peace, and there's so much going on. We all deserve that in our individual spaces, but in the collective as well. We carry a lot of generational trauma. The voices of our great, great grandmothers which were not able to be articulated, and their dreams which were not able to be realised because of how the system stifled them is traumatic, generationally.

I think it's important for us to be the generation that the trauma ends with, or at least for the burden to lessen. I don't want my children carrying the burden that I did. I think healing works - healing the brain, healing the mind, healing the spirit, healing the heart, and healing the body. Eating healthily, hydrating while we're doing this work, resting, showing up as healed as much as we can, right? I think that is very, very important.

You talked about glowing and I had a specific question about your red lipstick, coming to this interview, because it's your signature and it’s fire! I’m actually surprised it’s not on you today. [Laughs] What's the story?

Actually, there was no profound, big symbolic story. I just kind of liked it and there is no deep profound story to it. I just liked it. I kind of like fashion. It is cute.

Do you find yourself in moments where you feel like you need to reconcile that cute, “I am here, I am fashionable” look with the idea of feminists as not beautiful.

Actually, being cute came as a result of the reconciliation I did. I got a scholarship from the Mandela Rhodes Foundation (MRF), and they have four development workshops for their scholars - on leadership, education, entrepreneurship, and reconciliation.The reconciliation is on self-reconciliation. The question was what do we want to reconcile within ourselves. My answer was “I want to be soft and cute.” And once again, I'm going to honour my friend Iris because we have had multiple conversations on this.

I grew up as a tomboy. At the time, I thought it was a choice, but it wasn't really a choice. I was being a tomboy because I kind of wanted to look like the boys. I realised they didn't torment me as much as they tormented the other girls we played with. So, I was trying to protect myself by being tomboyish. That was my signature look - the baggy pants. Then later going through the MRF process I realised that I actually enjoyed playing around with fashion. I want the quirky earrings. I want the red lipstick. I want the shades. I want the cute dress. So, the reconciliation led me to knowing that I can still look that way while also doing the work, because it's also a way of confronting the misrepresentation of what feminism is.

And to end, please tell me : what is your feminist life motto?

I know it's a cliché but truly “the personal is political.” I draw a lot from that because even when I'm thinking, this is just my own personal experience in the house, I realise how it's connected to politics.

But if I have space for another, it is the remembrance that feminism has given me words to articulate things. And in my articulation, I felt like I was breathing. And when you breathe, you’re alive. So that's my feminist motto: to continuously navigate and untangle and make sense, and in the process, breathe. Then I'm able to take strides in the world.

I love it. Thank you so much, Lorato. I'm really glad that I got to have this conversation with you.

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