Dear young South Sudanese feminist,

You have been on my mind for much of the past ten months. Life’s demands have kept me from finishing this letter for so long. I hope 2026 has been gentle to you so far. Mine has been fair, although really busy. I am hoping to slow down a little toward the end of the year.

I actually started writing this letter last year, in November 2025. That month, South Sudanese social media was once again filled with debates about feminism, polygamy, relationships, and what women should or should not accept. Somewhere in the middle of it was a post by a young woman publicly denouncing her “feminist identity,” saying something along the lines of having found love and choosing to let her man love her.

Between 2016 and 2020 particularly, I used social media a lot for feminist advocacy, but I was not prepared for the scale and cruelty of the backlash that came with it. Those exchanges on Facebook brought back many unpleasant memories of the Twitter (now X) battles that other young South Sudanese feminists and I fought in the past. In some of those conversations, I recognized patterns of anti-feminist backlash that felt very familiar. I couldn’t help but wonder what it means for younger South Sudanese feminists navigating these spaces today, and what, if anything, those of us who have already lived through some of it can pass along. That is partly why I am writing this letter.

I am also writing from the other side of a transition. I am no longer a young feminist, nor am I speaking as one still finding her footing. Perhaps I will write another letter when I am much older, but I want to write this one while the memories are still intact and what I learned might still be useful to you now. I am not writing because I think I have figured it all out. I haven’t, at all. There are things I understand a little better now, things I would do differently, and many things I am still figuring out.

This letter has become much longer than I expected, so I am going to share it with you in three parts. There is a lot I want us to talk about, and I don’t want to rush through any of it. I hope you will stay with me.

When I started thinking about where to begin, November 2025 kept taking me back to another November, six years earlier. So perhaps that is where I should begin.

I am also writing from the other side of a transition. I am no longer a young feminist, nor am I speaking as one still finding her footing.

In November 2019, Rosebell Kagumire, a pan-African feminist writer and activist from Uganda, invited me to join a regional gathering of young feminists. A space she planned to co-convene in Uganda during the first week of December. I knew Rosebell on Twitter but had never engaged with her personally or met her. In the invitation email, she mentioned that as the year was coming to an end, they wanted to create space for young feminist activists, writers, and advocates to share experiences, take stock of the feminist pushes we have been involved in, and consider what we can do more of in the next year. After reading the brief convening concept note attached to the invitation, I figured she had been following some of my Twitter battles and knew the space would be useful to me.

Rosebell is one of the African feminists I am forever grateful to have crossed paths with, and she’s been an incredible sister to date. You never run out of fun and serious things to talk about with her, and she is one of the sweetest, most honest, and courageous humans you will ever meet. She made me believe in my writing and pushed me to write more. She continues to create platforms and connect African feminists across borders, and you can always trust her to shift narratives in any room and space she occupies.

That invitation came at a time when I was feeling deeply broken and on the verge of giving up on publicly identifying myself as a feminist, especially online, because the online backlash and abuse had taken a serious mental and emotional toll on me. I arrived for the convening the afternoon of the day before and had time to settle in ahead of the first of the convening’s three days.

This convening brought together 20 young feminists from the East and Horn of Africa to reflect on how to strengthen collective feminist power in response to growing digital and political backlash against women’s rights, while building solidarity, sharing strategies, and advancing feminist visions for justice and democracy in the region. While I had been in several youth and women’s strategic thinking spaces on peacebuilding, gender justice, and democracy, among other issues of focus at the national, regional, and international levels, this was my first time in an exclusively feminist space, where every single person in the room was a feminist with no buts and ifs.

I don’t remember every detail of the sessions, but I remember how I felt for those three days.  I remember listening to young feminists speak with a confidence I had almost convinced myself I no longer had. I remember the lightbulb moment during one of the morning sessions, when we were sharing experiences about the kinds of backlash we were facing. That morning, it became clear to me that I was not imagining the resistance and that the online attacks were not a personal failure or a sign that I was doing feminism wrong. It was my first time being in a space where I did not feel the need to explain why feminism mattered or soften my anger to feel accepted. I left Uganda feeling less alone, carrying with me the kind of feminist community of young women I never knew I longed for. Some of the young women I met in that convening became comrades, friends, and eventually sisters I still walk alongside today.

That invitation came at a time when I was feeling deeply broken and on the verge of giving up on publicly identifying myself as a feminist, especially online, because the online backlash and abuse had taken a serious mental and emotional toll on me.

At the time, I had no idea how those three days would become one of the most important turning points in my feminist journey, especially online. Three months later, the world shut down because of COVID-19. As physical spaces closed, many of us with internet access turned even more to social media for community and continued our feminist work online. Social media connected me to many feminists I would never have found otherwise. It also brought me into direct contact with a growing number of South Sudanese who opposed feminism and were determined to ridicule and silence South Sudanese feminists.

My follower count on Twitter grew, and so did the number of attacks and bullying. Opening my phone every single day of 2020 felt like a forced conscription into a battle I had not chosen. Most tweets I put out attracted insults, mockery, or people questioning my intelligence, morality, culture, or values. I was called ignorant, bitter, sad, lonely, angry, delusional, and a man-hater among other names. Other South Sudanese feminists were going through the same thing. There were days when anti-feminist posts dominated South Sudanese Twitter, with most people debating how feminism was foreign to or anti-South Sudanese cultures, norms, and values.

We found ourselves in several traps of defending the legitimacy of our feminism rather than discussing the real feminist issues affecting many women and girls across South Sudan. Those conversations were not just disagreements rooted in the need for better understanding or to dialogue. There were mostly opportunities to mock feminists, reduce us to stereotypes, and encourage others to join in the bullying.

Painful as a lot of those memories still are, those battles also introduced me to incredible young South Sudanese feminists and women from across the globe. We found one another in the hostility and built a community in the flames that tried to burn and erase our voices online. When the attacks became relentless, I reached out to a few young women and male allies to explore the possibility of creating a platform that could help centralize our voices.

That was how Gender Talk 211 was initiated, and indeed, the platform gave us a sense of collective power on Social Media. We curated conversations on Twitter by bringing in different curators, and later moved beyond social media to host conversations on the radio for the remainder of 2020. In 2021, we continued doing some Facebook Lives and hosting Twitter Spaces as Gender Talk 211 took more shape on the radio. Looking back now, I realize that the idea of Gender Talk 211, before it grew into a national platform for women and girls and the living feminist archive it is today, was a survival response to hold space for South Sudanese feminists online, because not long ago someone held space for me when I was close to disappearing. Many of the young women I met during that period are still some of my closest sisters today. 

We found ourselves in several traps of defending the legitimacy of our feminism rather than discussing the real feminist issues affecting many women and girls across South Sudan.

I learned a lot during those years, although some of it only became clear to me much later. There are things I wish I had understood then about my voice, my energy, and how much of myself I was giving to people online who had already decided what they thought of me. So, if we were sitting together and you asked me what I wish I had known as a younger feminist finding my voice, this is where I would start.

Define yourself before others define you

You will be called names such as angry, sad, lonely, delusional, old, single mother, divorcee, bitter, toxic, man-hater, and many other labels that will continue to be invented. Many of these labels have been used for generations to discredit, discipline, and silence women who refuse to be quiet. People will make things up about you. Things you never did or said, and insist that is what you stand for, and use those inventions to justify their abuse. I remember when people found out I was expecting my first child, someone tweeted, “The other human who has been ragging around saying all men are dogs and misogynists is now pregnant. Congratulations, ma’am, I can’t wait to see your puppy”. As usual, many anti feminists piled on that tweet in agreement and mockery, despite the fact that I had never once said that all men are dogs and misogynists.

Over time, I realized that the labels were never about me because they changed as I grew, but the intentions behind them remained the same. They were about delegitimizing and discrediting my voice to silence me.  I spent a lot of time defending my character instead of doing the work that mattered. Don’t let them keep you stuck on defending who you are. Focus your energy on the work that matters. 

Not every woman is a feminist

This sounds obvious to me now, but I didn’t fully understand it when I was younger. Some of the resistance we faced online came from women who mocked feminists, joined in the attacks, or defended some of the very things we were challenging. I won’t lie, sometimes that was harder for me to deal with than attacks from men, because every time the attacks came from a fellow woman, the timeline would be filled with men amplifying and celebrating her, along with their additional attacks. Suddenly, she was the woman who “understood our culture or the sensible woman”. It took me time to understand that the applause wasn’t always only about her, but also their way of disciplining us.

My feminist sisters and I sometimes fought these women head-on. Sometimes we became petty too, mocking them in return and calling them “pick-mes” and “patriarchy princesses” while going back and forth with them online. To be honest, I am not proud of some of those moments.

Don’t get me wrong, women should be held accountable when they cause harm. Not being a feminist is one thing; actively participating in anti-feminist attacks or causing harm to other women is another. What I think about differently now is that women, too, grow up in the same patriarchal system we are trying to change. When I get frustrated, I try to return to that. It helps me keep the door open a little longer for engagement and for the possibility that people can change. It is also one of the reasons I continue to create spaces for girls and young women to question what we have been taught and expand how they see themselves and the world around them, because no one else is coming to save us but ourselves.

I am still figuring out what it means to extend grace to women whose politics or actions cause harm. I don’t have a perfect answer for you. But if we believe people can question what they have been taught and change, then I think we have to leave room for that possibility, even as we challenge the harm they cause. All I can say is, be careful when patriarchy invites you into a fight with another woman online and then sits back to enjoy the show.

Protect your inner voice

After enough resistance, the voices around you will start to get into your head. You will start asking yourself, ” Am I doing the right thing? Do I need to tone down? Am I saying too much? They will make you question your values, knowledge of your culture, and try to strip you of your sense of belonging. One of the hardest lessons I have ever had to learn was that not every thought belonged to me; some of the doubts I carried were planted by years of ridicule, dismissal, and constant resistance and abuse.

When that happens, allow yourself to ask the questions. Questioning yourself does not always mean you are losing your way. I still question myself, and sometimes those questions have helped me grow. What I have learned is to be careful about where I take my doubts and whose voices I allow to answer them. Take them to people you trust, people who know you and can be honest with you without making you feel small. Sometimes you will realize that you do need to rethink something. Other times, you will realize that the doubt was never really yours to begin with. It came from hearing the same things about yourself over and over again. Protect your inner voice by being careful about whose voices you allow to become louder than your own.

Protect your energy and time for the work that matters

You will spend a lot of time trying to prove you are a “good feminist”. You will rewrite posts before posting them, overthink before you speak, or explain yourself over and over again. You will be told that you are not communicating well, that you are being misunderstood, or that if only you explained yourself better, people would finally understand feminism. Sometimes that will be true, but many times, it won’t.

This took me a long time, but I eventually learned that misunderstanding can become a resistance strategy in itself. Most people understand exactly what you are saying. They simply choose to distort it because it is easier to argue with a version of feminism they have made up than to engage with what you actually believe in or the work you are doing. Know when a conversation is worth having and when someone is simply trying to keep you defending yourself. Every hour you spend defending your feminism is an hour you are not building the world you are trying to create.

Your voice does not need permission

Please stop trying to become the “acceptable feminist”. The goalposts will keep shifting because they were never designed for you to reach them. If you are a survivor, you will be told that you are projecting your experience of abuse onto others. If you speak about forms of gender-based violence you have not personally experienced, you will be told you do not know enough. If you speak about marriage or domestic violence from experiences you liberated yourself from or walked away from, you will be accused of bitterness or wanting to break other families because you could not stay in yours. If you are happily married, you will be told you have no right to speak because your life is “fine”. If you are unmarried, your singleness will be blamed for why you are a feminist. Your age will always be weaponized against you, whether old or young.

And God forbid you find love. When people found out I was happily dating and getting married. It became another Twitter topic and reason to bully. Some of the attacks extended to mocking my husband-to-be. Others went as far as predicting with utmost certainty how our union would end soon in ‘premium tears’.

I have learned that there is no version of myself that would finally make everyone comfortable with my feminism. Every time one accusation stopped making sense, another one appeared instantly. People will continue rewriting your life to fit the story they have already decided about you. Even positive life events get filtered through those labels, stereotypes, and resistance. The problem was never about who I was. It is about my refusal to normalize what was diminishing my humanity. Your voice does not need permission to name what harms you or to work towards changing it.

I think this is a good place for us to take a break.

I have given you a glimpse of what online spaces looked like for many of us all those years ago and some of the ways those experiences shaped me. But the online world was never separate from the rest of my life. The things I was speaking about online came from what I was seeing, questioning, and experiencing around me, and what happened online often also found its way into my family, friendships, relationships, and community too. These were all spaces where I was finding my voice and figuring out what it meant to live as a feminist.

This brings us to the other thing. How do you hold on to your feminist values when the people pushing back against you are also people you love? How do you challenge things within a culture and community you still deeply belong to? What do you hold publicly, and what do you keep for yourself? I didn’t always know.

That is where I want us to pick up in the next part. For now, go and rest your eyes from this very long first part of this letter. When you come back, bring your favorite drink or snack. We still have a lot to talk about in Part Two.

Artwork by Bonslow Silas