Sibongile Ndashe is a South African international human rights lawyer who has dedicated her career to advancing women’s rights and sexual rights in Africa. In 2014, she founded the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA), a Ford grantee working to establish a network of lawyers across Africa who can identify and litigate gender and sexuality cases with the aim of establishing transformative precedent.

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ISLA is the first Africa-run strategic litigation initiative with a regional focus and expertise on women’s human rights and sexual rights. Can you tell us a little bit more about the organization?

We call ourselves a Pan-African and feminist organization and we work across the continent. We are a team of mostly lawyers who work with other lawyers to hold the state accountable for human rights violations. We focus on violations against women and those who face violations because of their sexuality, mainly LGBT people.

We also invest in creating a pool of feminist litigators who can do this work before the national courts. In law school, you may have an equal number or even sometimes more women than men. But as soon as people start working, we see many women leaving. So, by investing in the development of a pool of feminist litigators, we wanted to be able to change the law but to also change the way in which legal practice happens.

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In 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world to constitutionally prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. How has that impacted society?

The Constitution is really informed by what activists, including LGBT activists, went through under apartheid. That, in some ways, created the environment for South Africa to become one of the first in the world to have this protection in the constitution. Once that happened, we were lucky to have a court that saw itself as transformative. So when LGBT cases came up around 1998, you had a court that really didn’t have to struggle to decide what it means to do away with these discriminatory laws.

But, that being said, we live in a country that has got extremely high levels of violence against LGBT people. And I think what it teaches us is that legal and policy change that comes from courts or from parliament is not enough to bring about social change. And I guess that’s why in our work we are really invested in not only working with courts but also this idea that we need to be able to work with the people who are impacted by the laws so that the struggle doesn’t die once lawyers have had their champagne moments and they have won their cases.

As feminists, we understand that legal change sometimes activates oppositional forces. We are seeing the growth of right wing fundamentalists in South Africa who have been pushing back against comprehensive sexuality education because some educators and parents are now saying that the curriculum will make their children gay. So I do think that despite all of these changes that have happened, we still have a long way to go.

According to Human Rights Watch, 32 of Africa’s 54 nations have laws that criminalize same-sex relationships, with varying provisions. Can you talk about some of the bright spots in this bleak landscape?

Angola decriminalized same-sex relationships in 2019. Mozambique decriminalized it in 2015, as did Cape Verde in 2004. We saw Botswana last year overturn the laws that criminalize same-sex relationships. Efforts to decriminalize same-sex relations in Kenya failed, although the case is now on appeal. But we have had moments of celebration—in Kenya, LGBT groups are able to officially register as organizations.

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What does equality look like to you?

I live in a country like South Africa where there are big disparities, whether we’re talking about income, whether we’re talking about gender. So part of it is, we are so comfortable with the disparities that exist because some people have accepted that that’s the way society functions. And so inequality has become normalized. So are we going to be able to distribute the resources so that everyone is equal? I don’t know, but I would hope so.

When it comes to women’s rights issues, there are people who say that there’s no need for feminism because all the battles have been won: Women can go to school. Women can vote. Women can go to work.

Feminism is much more needed today, as it was needed when the suffrage movement started. When you look at formal equality, formal equality was very easy because you are saying you cannot treat women differently from the way in which you treat men. But it is substantive equality that has become a problem, because courts, parliaments, really do not understand how inequality exists, especially when it pertains to women.

The fact that my body, my person, is vulnerable at all times … I am worried about being attacked—it means that I am unequal. I’m not able to participate as a citizen in the same way that men actually participate. Equality, therefore, will have to mean that all of those barriers that do not make me feel like a full citizen are removed so that I can participate fully and enjoy all my human rights.