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Call for Abstracts

Invitation to Contribute to the Anthology Titled:

Stories of Erasure and  Reclamation:  Revisiting the 1970s intellectual Debates’ Backyard .

Uhenga Collective invites writers, scholars, artists, poets, researchers, and cultural practitioners to contribute to a multigenre and multilingual anthology co edited by Demere Kitunga Diana Kamara and Rehema Chachage, that revisits and reinterprets the Dar es Salaam Intellectual Debates of the 1970s—and their afterlives—through decolonial, and intersectional feminist lenses. This anthology seeks to foreground the erased, silenced, and marginalized histories of women at the University of Dar es Salaam: students, faculty, activists, artists, administrators, cultural workers, international students and their associates whose intellectual labour and everyday struggles remain largely absent from mainstream narratives. Submissions should critically, creatively, and expansively engage with the intellectual and social histories of the University, illuminate the gendered dynamics of knowledge production, and bring forward narratives, analyses, and forms that challenge the exclusions embedded within dominant historiographies. We seek work that expands the ways this history is remembered, unsettles masculinist mythologies, and reimagines liberatory traditions for future generations.

Deadline

Abstracts/draft proposals due:

15/1/2026

Photo by The Lutheran World Federation, cropped and used under CC BY-SA 2.0.

1. Scope & Themes

We encourage diverse forms of scholarly and creative engagement, including:

Gendered exclusions within radical intellectual and political spaces

Contributions may focus primarily on the 1970s but are welcome to trace continuities into the 1980s–present.

Women’s visibility, agency, and feminist questions within the 1970s debates
Feminist organizing, institution-building, and political formations (e.g., WRDP, TAMWA, TGNP)
The legacy and violence of Punch and other masculinist infrastructures
Domesticity, care work, intimacy, and the everyday life of women on campus
Women in the sciences, humanities, law, education, literature and the arts
Politics of language, translation, genre, pedagogy, and publishing cultures
Intersections of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and generation
The roles of international and African women students and faculty members
Student activism, resistance, and feminist organizing
Memory, storytelling, and reclamation as feminist method
Archival absences, silences, distortions, and the politics of remembering
Counter-publics, theatre cultures, Kiswahili performance traditions, and embodied knowledges
Creative engagements with figures such as Levina Mukasa, and others rendered peripheral in official histories

Contributions may focus primarily on the 1970s but are welcome to trace continuities into the 1980s–present.

2. Accepted Formats

Critical essays (3,000–6,000 words)
Review essays or commentaries (1,000–2,000 words)
Conversations or interviews (2,000–3,000 words)
Testimonies or personal narratives (2,000–3,000 words)
Poetry, creative nonfiction, or hybrid forms (3–5 pages max ~ 2,000 words)
Visual or artistic interventions/comics (with short accompanying texts, 1 page max ~ 500 words)
Satiric/humour intervention (1–2 pages ~ 1,000 words)
Map-making, archival reproductions, or lexicons (subject to discussion)

3. Languages

Submissions are welcome in English, Kiswahili, or both. Contributors are encouraged to write in the language that best honours the stories, theoretical framings, or cultural contexts they engage.

4. Referencing & Permissions

Use Chicago (author-date) style for citations.
Contributors working with archival materials, photography, or institutional documents must secure reproduction permissions where required.
Oral histories or interviews must include consent statements.

5. Submission Process

Please submit the following:

Proposed contribution (Abstract word limit 500 words)
A short bio (100–150 words)
Contact details
Statement of language preference for editing

6. Timelines

Abstracts/draft proposals due: January 15, 2026
Feedback on Abstract: February 6, 2026
Final submissions (after acceptance of abstract) due: April 15, 2026
Editorial feedback: Two weeks after submission
Final revisions: June 15

Note:

Contributions should primarily engage with the 1970s, while allowing for reflections on continuities into the 1980s–present. We particularly encourage work that connects personal memory with broader political culture, and that foregrounds Kiswahili or other local languages.

This anthology seeks to cultivate a collective intellectual reckoning—one that honours women’s knowledge, refuses erasure, and reimagines liberatory traditions for future generations.

We especially welcome early-career writers, feminist researchers, and/or storytellers working across genres. We also invite submissions of previously published works, provided permission for republication is secured.

Submit Here (Google Forms)

Ngoma Huanza na Lele Invitation

Lelemama Residency: Week 2