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
A Toolkit, Guide & Resource
Love and Courage, A Story of Insubordination is used as a toolkit, guide and curriculum resource by individuals, organisations and movements, including feminist activists, teachers, writers, trade unionists, and parliamentarians. It is used to teach anti-racist and anti-capitalist feminism, political memoir, personal and political transformation, budgets, economics and law-making, political transitions and women's coalitions, history and herstory, meditation & activism.
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Layli Maparyan's book, The Womanist Idea, distills seven lessons from Love and Courage. These lessons are illustrated by quotes from Love and Courage and the IFUN Curriculum workshop
Insights: Peggy Antrobus, Rajasvini Bhansali, Eve Ensler, Pumla Gqola, Jessica Horn, Desiree Lewis, Amina Mama, Mmatshilo Motsei, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Mary Robinson, Connie September & Pamela Shifman. Moments: the AWID Power of Movements Workshop, the Curriculum Workshop on Love and Courage, the Insubordinate Leadership Lecture and the Queer and Trans Art-iculations Exhibition
Lessons from Love and Courage
From The Womanist Idea
By Layli Maparyan
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"In 2007, I traveled to South Africa to attend a two-week pedagogy workshop (on Globalisation and Feminism) organized by the International Feminist University Network (IFUN)…To aid and assist with this undertaking, IFUN had invited one Pregs Govender to lead the group…"
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Pamela Shifman Margo Okazawa-Rey Mary Robinson Jessica Horn Eve Ensler Mmatshilo Motsei
Joy & Dignity
“Love and Courage reminds us that integrity and love are non-negotiable; that revolutionary imagination and practice go hand in hand, and wisdom and vulnerability are inseparable. For feminists who seek to use power in non-patriarchal ways, the book chronicles the rigor, love and self-reflection required... Pregs details the personal transformation, careful organising and movement building necessary to change the priorities of institutions that shape women's lives... that we as women need to confront patriarchal institutions and the patriarchy that lives inside each of us. I worked closely with Pregs 20 years ago and saw the way she always put the interests and needs of the most marginalised women front and centre... made sure that the Committee on Women went to the rural areas to listen to women... organised yoga for all of us - Ministers, MPs, staff - with no concept of hierarchy... that she never forgot why she was there... I watched as she influenced the creation of women's budgets all over the world; inspired feminists to stand up against injustice... put issues of water and sanitation front and centre of the SAHRC long before water crises were universally recognised as the grave concern they are today... her commitment to careful listening, deep consultation, questioning authority and the way things are usually done... to always bringing joy and laughter to movement work."
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Peggy Antrobus Amina Mama Pumla Gqola Connie September Desiree Lewis Rajasvini Bhansali
Strategies for Transformation
"It’s a gift at so many levels:
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A spiritual journey, to be sure, and very inspiring as such.
It is also the ‘untold story of apartheid’, how its evil tentacles reaches into the hearts of its opponents, even after it has ended.
It is also full of ‘strategies for transformation’ – how to work through groups – women’s organisations, trade unions, political movements, parliament – to bring about gender justice, and how this is linked inextricably to economic justice and democracy.
And it’s a love story of a woman’s enduring relationship with intimate partners, children, parents, siblings and friends…
I would like every feminist activist, every female politician, to read it."
Curriculum Workshop on Love and Courage
Photos by Noncedo Gxekwa
"You courageously point to why and how we can shift from our paralysis. Wash away our apathy. Manifest alternative futures to the ones our racism, greed and brutality are carving out"
- Malika Ndlovu, From tribute poem to Pregs
Interactive Lecture: Insubordinate Leadership
UCT
Photos by Callum Tilbury
Pregs guided participants, including writers, students, activists and academics, through an exercise that began with silently connecting to their own dignity and that of each other, before creatively mirroring each other's movements. Participants discussed the leadership within each of us and our capacity for powerful individual and collective action that can create a world of equality, justice, peace and freedom.
AWID's 11th Forum: 'The Power of Movements'
Audio of Pregs' plenary address & the workshop she facilitated with SA feminist movements
Photos by Muholi
Pregs facilitating the South African Feminist workshop at AWID
Queer & Trans Art-iculations
Connecting to the art of
Muholi & Gabrielle Le Roux
Muholi, who aims "to re-write a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance" with Pregs, who presented the keynote address
Pregs on women's rights as human rights and how SA and international law upholds or undermines these rights irt land, seeds and water - Rural Women's Assembly
Asserting clean water, sanitation and dignity as human rights
Making women's lives visible in public policy - First Parliamentary Debate on Central Statistics Services (CSS), 1994