Many African societies pre colonisation were structured in such a way that individuals needed a community to survive. As such community accountability was built into norms, into spirituality and into everyday life. In modern post colonial and neo colonial Africa, is community accountability an impossible dream.
In August 2023 six brilliant queer thinkers sat in a hotel meeting room in Diani, Kenya. The task at hand was daunting. They had to put organisational structures to something that had been born in protest.
Queer Republic was the name given to the continent wide solidarity that had come about during a January 2022 march for young high school queers whose education and futures was threatened by thoughtless hateful remarks by Kenya's CAS of education. After two years of keeping in touch, holding virtual meetings including mental health check - ins, the two activists behind the movement Marylize Biubwa and Zawadi Mashego knew they had to do more to keep work moving. They also both had a very ambitious vision of an African wide movement.
The people in the room on this day assembled by Biubwa and Zawadi would have made any corporate or startup jealous by the amount of diversity in skill and expertise that they brought. There was an auditor who had vast experience in NGO work and philanthropy, there was an HR professional who was the thinker behind some of Kenya's biggest corporate hires, there was an health professional embedded in South Africa's healthcare system, there was a social entrepreneur whose career spanned everything that was known as Kenya's Silicon Savannah. But the task at hand defied all their expertise, the challenge was how to remain accountable to community, to the high schoolers who inspired the formation of the Republic, to the queer communities who in 26 African countries were considered a criminalised population.
In mainstream NGOs and Corporates it is always a no - brainer in what direction accountability flows. To keep registration and legal compliance all of these organisations comply with the laws of the nation they are registered in. These laws include the laws that make them a legal entity, they also include regulations of finances, compliance with taxation. For the NGOs in addition to this there is the added layer of compliance with donor requirements. The amount of administration and operations work that goes into all of this accountability makes up a huge part of the work that goes on in many of these types of organisations. Upward accountability is the name given to government and donor accountability. Even the name itself is skewed to a status quo.
Finally after five days of working this brilliant team had a written strategy on how to turn upside down the pyramid of accountability and put community accountability at the top while still balancing out with their new status as an organisation registered to support a movement.
Over the next couple of blogs we will break down what they came up with and more thought leadership initiatives from the Queer Republic.