Unfinished Freedom: Persistence of Colonial Gendered Governance and the Contemporary Feminist Efforts to Contest It

The report argues that these contemporary struggles are rooted in colonial governance systems that reorganised gender, labour, and authority. Colonial administrations did not simply impose political control; they institutionalised gendered hierarchies that repositioned women as economic dependents, while extracting their unpaid reproductive and agricultural labour. At the same time, colonial regimes redefined violence against women as “customary” or “cultural,” obscuring the structural conditions that produced and normalised it. Sexual violence, in contexts such as British Kenya and German-ruled Namibia, was often bureaucratically managed in ways that shielded state authority from accountability.

Although formal sovereignty shifted with independence, many of these governing logics persist. Religion, law, and medicine continue to function as interlocking systems of bodily regulation. Missionary moral frameworks shape contemporary debates on sexuality and family life in Kenya and Namibia. Inherited legal structures determine which harms are prosecutable and which remain marginal. Reproductive governance remains central to state authority, visible in restrictive abortion regimes, documented cases of forced sterilisation in Namibia, and racialised medical neglect in the United Kingdom.

Across contexts, institutional and media narratives produce hierarchies of recognition that render some women “protectable” and others deviant or undeserving. Regulation is therefore not exceptional but embedded within the architecture of the modern state.

Feminist movements across the four countries are actively contesting these structures. Mobilisations such as #OnsIsMoeg, #ShutItAllDown, and #SayHerName challenge narrow constructions of womanhood and expose how migrant women, sex workers, and other marginalised groups are frequently excluded from protection and public mourning. However, activism operates within constraints: adversarial legal systems, class and generational fractures, and donor-driven funding frameworks that can depoliticise structural critique.

The report concludes that African women’s bodily autonomy remains structurally constrained across colonial, postcolonial, and diasporic settings. Violence and reproductive control are not episodic failures, but manifestations of enduring governance logics through which sovereignty, morality, and economic order are maintained.

Colonial systems of gendered governance continue to shape legal, religious, medical, and humanitarian institutions across both African and European contexts.

Reproductive regulation remains a key instrument of state power, visible in Namibia’s apartheid-era abortion law and in the persistent racial disparities in maternal mortality in the United Kingdom.

African women’s suffering is made highly visible in moments of crisis, yet it is often disconnected from meaningful institutional accountability.

Respectability politics continues to influence whose lives are recognized as worthy of protection, whose deaths are publicly mourned, and who is excluded from collective concern.

Contemporary feminist movements are opening new political spaces that challenge inherited hierarchies and call for systemic, rather than incremental, transformation.

Cross-Cutting Policy Priorities

• Reframe the epistemological foundations of gender policy beyond universalized Western categories, incorporating historically grounded and context-specific approaches.

• Adopt relational models of harm and prevention, recognizing the structural dimensions of violence.

• Embed colonial accountability within institutional reform, including legal, medical, and administrative systems.

• Strengthen transnational and diasporic feminist alliances, while supporting independent funding infrastructures that reduce donor gatekeeping.

Context-Specific Recommendations

• Kenya: Integrate historical accountability into reproductive health and SGBVF policy. Expand beyond punitive frameworks toward community-based models of healing and prevention.

• Namibia: Explicitly link GBV policy to colonial histories and racialized economic inequality. Develop independent feminist funding mechanisms to reduce donor conditionality.

• United Kingdom: Implement race-conscious medical training and enforceable accountability mechanisms to address racial disparities in maternal health and reproductive harm.

• Germany: Extend decolonization efforts beyond symbolic restitution toward institutional reform in healthcare, asylum systems, and survivor support services.