Love, Courage & Insubordination
The Official Website of Pregs Govender, Author and Feminist
Creating community & solidarity through writing
Connecting to ancestors, artists, activists & movements
Invoking the power of love & courage to be insubordinate to injustice
Love and Insubordination
Podcast Series
Love & Insubordination is a groundbreaking podcast series, that seeks to inspire change & ignite the flames of compassion within our hearts. Activist and author Pregs Govender and her guests, explore the connection between love and insubordination, during the struggle against apartheid and ongoing campaigns to transform unjust global systems. Listen to stories that amplify silenced voices and unearth the root causes of injustice. Explore creative tools for personal & political transformation. Be emboldened to stand for humanity and a more just and humane world.
EPISODE 2
Free Palestine and Humanity
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Episode 2 reflects on history, the global war economy and feminist solidarity. I’m in conversation with African feminist Yaliwe Clarke and we end with prescient lines from Episode 1, ‘What do I do with my heart?’ ; a short extract from Sipho Mthathi’s poem Geography; and the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s Sarah Ihmoud, reading Mosab Abu Toha’s poem ‘We love what we have’. May the power of love inspire our insubordination to injustice.
About Yaliwe Clarke
Yaliwe Clarke is a is feminist educator, a skilled conflict resolution practitioner, trainer, and facilitator who has worked with feminist organisations across the world. She is especially interested in African Feminism, security, development, and peace building. Her feminist activism began in Zambia where she grew up. Much of her work has been inspired by her mother, Sara Longwe, a renowned Zambia Feminist.
EPISODE 1
What do I do with my heart?
Episode Pregs sits down with feminist, teacher, writer and poet Sipho Mthathi. Sipho has led local and international organisations and movements, including the Treatment Action Campaign, Oxfam and currently Tekano. Pregs' and Sipho's personal stories invite us to navigate complex political contexts that are governed by unjust economic, military and ideological power. They reflect on battles against their own government, greedy corporations, powerful states, unequal trade systems, and the struggle for universal healthcare, specifically affordable life-saving medication for all. Pregs concludes by inviting listeners to creatively reflect on and continue their own conversations about love and insubordination, wherever they are.
About Siphokazi Mthathi
I am grateful to my immediate ancestors who set off our family’s journey and watched over us. Mandicamagushe kuni boJojo, boTiyeka, boMabombo, boZikhali, boMbizana, boButsolo bentonga! And to ancestors who have been defending our lives, dignity and heritage long before we came. I am grateful to teachers who helped shape and inspire me to be that for others.
To the communities I come from and to those who let me into their lives, propelling a journey in social justice that would become 25 years in the school of life, radical love, believing we all deserve a just world and taking action to make it so.
My sisters in the feminist movement in my home continent and across the world, who not only taught me that Feminist values are my inheritance, but excavated my humanity just as systems of oppression were burying it. My comrades in the Treatment Action Campaign where I spent 8 years organising as a branch member, teacher and student, Deputy Chairperson and General Secretary. Comrades across our continent with whom we formed the Pan-African Treatment Access Movement, and boldly took our experience, visions, and voices to the global stage. Our queer movement family, with whom we walked the streets of Egoli, Maseru, Harare, Lilongwe, Dar es Salaam and elsewhere, painted freedomscapes in rainbow colours and insisted queer
liberation is African! Colleagues and comrades in International Organisations and spaces I have worked and organised through, who helped expand my perspective and deepen my resolve for justice for African peoples and for all in our world. I am grateful for the vision of those who founded Tekano, where I get to walk alongside social change makers who work to build conditions of justice for all, without exception, to enjoy health and
well-being. We call it Health Equity! I am grateful to those with whom I have served organisational missions through Board membership including at Open Society Institute for Southern Africa, the Women on Farms Project, Sex Workers
Education and Advocacy Task Force, Alternative Information and Development Centre, Oxfam International’s Executive Board, Tekano Health Equity South Africa, Women’s Legal Centre. I am grateful for words, loyal companions who show up as little poems when I need to make meaning of baffling things.
Too many to count, in you all I have a multitude of teachers. I am privileged to be standing on the shoulders of giants!
