“We are not our mothers.” I have heard this phrase from several young South Sudanese women. I have heard it in women’s empowerment spaces, on social media, and in other circles. What often follows is a declaration of agency: a refusal to tolerate patriarchal violence, a collective insistence on dignity, and sometimes a public show of solidarity when a young woman leaves an abusive relationship or challenges violence.

I’ve become increasingly uneasy as I’ve reflected more on it over the past year. To me, it suggests that our mothers chose to be cowards, remain silent, or feel trapped, and confuses our current options and choices with courage. It also assumes that because our mothers did not necessarily have the language of “feminism,” they did not practice it, as if the word itself is the work. In this essay, I argue that what we often call our mothers’ “endurance” was, in many ways, a form of resistance, and that many of the freedoms we have today were made possible by the ways they negotiated, creatively advocated for their rights and needs, cared for others, and pushed back.

African feminist scholars such as Amina Mama, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, and Obioma Nnaemeka have greatly helped me understand the importance of situating African women’s lives within the historical, social, economic, and political conditions that shape their choices and possibilities at any given time. Nnaemeka’s concept of“nego-feminism,” for example, describes negotiation as a key feminist tactic in many African contexts. Oyěwùmí shows how easily we can misinterpret certain African contexts and social structures when we view them through the lens of imported colonial and Western gender discourses.

“It suggests that our mothers chose to be cowards, remain silent, or feel trapped, and confuses our current options and choices with courage.”

These scholars also encourage us to recognize where knowledge resides. As Amina Mama notes, African feminist knowledge has developed not only in academic spaces but also through feminist engagement with political struggles and collective organizing. African Sexualities: A Reader, edited by Sylvia Tamale, draws attention to how culture, law, religion, and everyday practices shape gender relations and reproduce power, showing how these become important aspects of African feminist struggle and interpretation. 

Amina Mama does an incredible job of demonstrating how women are often mobilized to support broader political struggles, while their own demands are sidelined or absorbed into male-led and male-focused agendas that do not center them. The Story of the Katiba Banat within the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the armed wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, during the second Sudanese civil war (1983-2005) offers a powerful example. These teenage girls and young women, like the boys and young men of their time, joined the struggle, challenged expectations of what young women could do, and contributed to the liberation movement. Yet their stories are rarely included in how the armed struggle is remembered or honored today.

On the other hand, Ifi Amadiume’s insights on Igbo society show that women’s authority can be organized through kinship systems and social roles rather than only through formal political structures. This insight is true in many South Sudanese communities, including among the Jieng, where I come from, where women’s influence has long flowed through family networks, caregiving roles, and immense labor that sustains everyday life.

Although none of the African feminist scholars whose ideas shape this essay are from South Sudan, their work is African and feminist, making it relevant to our realities. I did not find anything they analyzed that felt unfamiliar in various South Sudanese contexts. They helped me understand that the women before us resisted in ways that looked different and often had fewer visible choices. This does not mean our mothers were weaker, less intelligent, or less courageous. 

Our mothers resisted in ways I understand differently now. I think about how often women sang while performing their domestic duties. Even the songs they used to soothe children were not just lullabies; they contained messages they wanted heard. They looked out for and secretly supported girls and young women to escape unwanted marriages. Many of these mothers and aunties faced severe backlash, including physical violence, for these acts of facilitating resistance for girls and younger women. 

“This does not mean our mothers were weaker, less intelligent, or less courageous.”

They resisted through communal and collective care. Growing up, I witnessed women support each other at births, funerals, and community gatherings, bringing food, labor, and the multiple visits where they would just gather and enjoy each other’s company in a given home, here and there. Looking back now, I admire and appreciate their gift of presence to each other, but as a young girl, those visits were my least favorite because they meant endless tea preparation and serving. The tea somehow always seemed not to be hot enough, no matter how many times you said you just got it off the fire. There was always something you were yelled at for not doing right with the tea. They composed songs and created spaces to gather, dance, and connect. Even laughter carried meaning; sometimes women laughed in ways that passed their messages without saying a single word. 

For example, däny is one of my favorite women’s dance performances among the Jieng in Jonglei State, especially among women from Bor County, where my mother comes from. The performance happens in two circles, an inner and an outer one. It begins with the women forming the inner circle and leaning slightly forward, closer to one another. As they lean forward, they begin to clap until the palms find their rhythm. Then the singing starts, voices rising together as ululations break through, lifting the energy. Around them, women in the outer circle form and start to dance löör in slow motion and in one direction, jumping in measured steps, their feet briefly touching in the air before landing back on the ground as they rotate around the inner circle. Their arms rise and fold with the movement of their feet. No one directs the transitions; the circles keep shifting naturally as women switch between them, maintaining the rhythm of the palms, the singing, the dancing, and the laughter that rises between songs.

“Even laughter carried meaning: sometimes women laughed in ways that passed their messages without saying a single word.”

I remember a song my grandmother used to sing often. The song was composed by a woman who called out a leader women felt was neglecting his wives. At the time, new seasonal fabrics and styles had become popular, but none of his wives had anything decent to wear. The women mocked him through song, singing that the new cloth would go out of fashion before their leader ever bought any for his wives. In the song, they sang about wearing rags like his wives, calling his name directly, and further referring to him as a leader who does not honor women. My grandmother used to laugh while telling the story. She said eventually, the man became embarrassed enough to start buying these trendy fabrics for his wives.

I also remember another song composed by a woman speaking openly and in such painful depth about the abuse she experienced in her marriage. It is still one of the saddest and most heartbreaking songs about domestic violence I have ever heard. Later, when one of my uncle’s wives was staying with us during a difficult period in her marriage, she would often sing that song. I think now about how women used songs like these to speak through one another. Sometimes it was easier or safer to sing somebody else’s words than to speak directly about your own pain. Such tactics gave women a language for experiences many of them shared but could not always openly name as their own.

These songs, or Däny, were more than entertainment; they were strategies that women used to build community and solidarity and to comment on social issues, creating the change they desired. They called out neglect, abusive men, affirmed one another, and advocated for their needs in ways that enabled them to exercise agency and speak up within the constraints of their realities. These acts remind us that long before many of us had the language of feminism, our mothers were practicing it.

The growing list of choices available to our generation today is built on this foundation. Our ability to attend school, to work beyond survival and the care and reproductive roles that have long sustained our communities, to name abuse, to speak openly, and to leave harmful relationships, among others, was made possible, at least in part, by generations of South Sudanese women who strategically advocated so we could openly refuse. Many of us grew up watching our mothers tolerate things we didn’t yet have the words for. I’ve come to understand the limitations our mothers faced: the war, displacement, economic hardship, family and community pressures, and the lack of basic laws or systems to protect them, to say the least. The courage we claim today didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was shaped by observing and listening to them. Even the clarity with which we oppose certain harms is owed to the lessons they taught us.

“These acts remind us that long before many of us had the language of feminism, our mothers were practicing it.”  

As a mother now, I think about that statement a lot. I know many of us doing this work today may never fully experience the kind of freedom or change we hope for. If my daughters end up moving through South Sudan more freely than I ever could, it will not be because my generation lacked courage. It will be because we spent so much of our lives trying to make that freedom more possible for them. I cannot imagine the heartbreak of doing this work, all these sacrifices, carrying the backlash, staying in the struggle, only to be remembered by my daughters as someone who “did not choose better or was not courageous enough to make certain choices.” I would feel betrayed.

I guess that is why I have been looking back to understand the conditions that shaped my mother’s and the women of her generation’s choices. Most of the feminist wins I enjoy today were not fought by my generation. They were enabled by the lives they led, their negotiations and confrontations, and the many ways they ensured their daughters would live differently. The act of my mother and her peers (the Katiba Banat) who joined the SPLA during the second Sudanese civil war taught me more about courage than any written feminist text ever could. My feminism, like that of many South Sudanese women of my generation, was not born in isolation. It was nurtured in the homes of women who may not have had the language of feminism, but practically taught it to us. 

My daughters, in turn, will inherit the ground we are clearing now. If they have more choices, I hope they will understand that the generations before them paid the price for the feminist wins that made those choices possible. Those wins are part of a long and unfinished journey carried across generations, from the women who raised us to the women we are becoming, and to the girls who will one day walk farther than we could ever dream.

Further Reading

The ideas in this essay are shaped by African feminist scholarship, particularly the following works:

• Amina Mama, “What Does It Mean to Do Feminist Research in African Contexts?” (2011)
• Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women. Making An African Sense Of Western Gender Discourses (1997)
• Obioma Nnaemeka, “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way” (2004)
• Sylvia Tamale (ed.), African Sexualities: A Reader (2011)
• Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987)