Chernor Bah | Leading the Global Feminist Revolution from Sierra Leone

Ever since anyone can remember, Chernor Bah has been campaigning and fighting for one cause or another. So much so that he was once nicknamed the “Minister with no Portfolio ''.

When Sierra Leone’s civil war ended, barely into his teenage years, Chernor was disappointed that the rebuilding process did not include children like him who had been deeply affected by war. So, he campaigned to have a “Children’s parliament”. He didn’t fully get his wish, but the government approved of a “Children forum”. He would go around the country mobilizing and collecting stories of kids affected by war and sharing them with leaders and policy makers. Years later, as an adult, he would go on to take a similar role at the United Nations in New York where he would travel the world to conflict areas to collect stories of child soldiers and children of war and come back and share them with the UN security council. 

When the Ebola crisis hit and brought his country to its knees, Chernor left his comfortable job in New York, to join his countrymen and women in tackling the crisis. While on the ground, he realized that even though women, as primary caregivers, were the most affected, no one was looking out for them. No one was communicating in the language that they could understand on how they could protect themselves or their families from the deadly virus. 

After the crisis ended, he knew he couldn’t just go back to his nice apartment in New York and live comfortably with his beautiful wife and kids. He had found yet another calling, and he hasn’t looked back since. 

Today, to give you a glimpse of the work that he does alongside his team at Purposeful, in 2018, Chernor led and helped create a movement called “The Black Tuesday” that helped push Sierra Leone to declare Rape a national emergency and thus change rape laws and create specialized rape courts. And when the government banned pregnant girls from going to school, Chernor and team protested, sued the government, then wrote the bill and policy that the government eventually adopted; providing for a radical inclusivity in education policy and guaranteeing that pregnant girls, disabled and children from poor communities all have access to education.  We’re pleased to share below a recent conversation we had with Chernor, at Purposeful Headquarters, during our visit to Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Chernor Bah

Please introduce yourself to the TAP Fam

My name is Chernor bah. I'm the co-founder and co-CEO of Purposeful. Purposeful is a feminist organization with an ambition to remake the world with and for girls. We're proudly headquartered here in Sierra Leone, but we have footprints in over 100 countries around the world.

What is your definition of a feminist and how does a man get to lead one of the biggest feminist movements on the continent?

I get asked all the time, how does a Muslim African Fulani man identify as a feminist and co-lead a feminist organization that is dedicated entirely to girls, and it's a complex set of answers. For me, my definition of feminist is very simple. It's the radical belief that women and girls are human beings and the commitment to do everything in your power to ensure that they enjoy and live as full human beings in every way, shape, and form. 

I have been socialized like most people who are born and grew up in patriarchal societies, to not believe in that, to not see the world from that perspective, to continue to see women as second-class human beings, that girls are less. That's the socialization that I have. But I also have had the privilege of education, the privilege of being raised by a single mom, the privilege of my personal favorite human being my grandmother, who was married at age 12, had 12 children, eight of them died and 4 lived past 100 years. That's the icon in my life. But what has informed my feminist identity and my feminist journey is both that personal history and my own learnings and commitments and questioning and constant learning and relearning. This is why I say with confidence that I'm a feminist.

And I know that just saying that triggers debates, questions, and curiosity, sometimes even backlash, because a lot of people don't think that a man should be a feminist. I strongly disagree. I believe that being a feminist is all about having a set of values and a commitment that one tries to live by every day. 

You’ve previously mentioned that you’re a feminist and not an “equalitarian”, please expand.

I'm not an equalitarian, as some people call themselves. I'm a feminist because I understand and accept that the root cause of injustice and inequality in this world are intentional sets of policies, Laws, practices, and beliefs that discriminate against females, that treat girls as less than full human beings. That's my starting point. That's the premise of my belief. It's not just, oh, everybody should get the same. No, it's that girls and women have been historically discriminated against and that we need to do everything we can, including affirmative action, when it's appropriate to balance that equation, to make sure that everybody can have access to the same opportunities. 

That's the work we do at Purposeful, that's why we're very bold and unapologetic about funding girls, about our hiring. Over 90% of our staff are female. We make sure that the opportunities we have at Purposeful, we give girls priority because that's the world we imagine. We want to create a world where women and girls can live in their full power, where they can have access to opportunities. We understand that the world as currently constructed does not give them much of an opportunity. The basic premise of Purposeful is to recreate, and to remake this world so that girls are living in safety, in dignity, and in their full power. To do that, you need to create a movement that is led with and is for girls. That is powered by girls themselves and especially girls who are often the most marginalized, the ones who are most removed from power.

You don't create sustainable change by investing in the people with power and trying to change their mind. There's no evidence of power giving up power voluntarily. The evidence is you build the power of those without it, and then they challenge the status quo.

What are some of the key things that you do at Purposeful? 

At Purposeful, we're really doing four major things. One, redistributing power. That's the basic premise of Purposeful. We believe that money is power. Thus, girls need to have access to money. 

And we do that by removing these colonial barriers that are placed around the distribution of money such as having to write formalized proposals, we cut that all off. You don't need to be writing reports to us every time! You don’t have to be registered. We cut all these barriers off. We have different schemes here that are led by the amazing women at Purposeful that take money in boxes into poor communities across this country and give this money to girls and say, we trust you to go on and do amazing things and we’ve got countless stories of remarkable things that've been done with that money. 

Giving girls money is a fundamental point of our work, and it's what leads to the most controversy, the most pushback. People think it’s risky to give girls power, they will fail. Girls are worth the risk, and in fact when you give girls money, we see that in fact what happens, is that they can do amazing things in their communities. And even if they fail with the money in terms of the project, you know, failures are often reserved for the privileged. Let them fail! We want them to have the right to fail because that's part of the journey of growth.

The second thing we do is to intentionally build girls' power. At Purposeful, our work is political. That's why we start by identifying ourselves as feminists. To be a feminist is political, It's not passive. So yes, we do help girls to raise their own consciousness. We support them to form groups and collectives led by mentors. We give them radical political education, we let them see that the source of their oppression is patriarchy and that patriarchy manifests in different forms in and around them. We then give them the tools to be able to confront that and deal with it.

One of our programs around building girls’ power has over 17,000 girls in all the districts across Sierra Leone. So that's a big part of what we're doing. But we're also a hub, we're a movement- building hub. That also involves organizing power and bringing different groups together.

We just hosted the largest conference in the history of Sierra Leone of any kind. We had 950 delegates from 41 countries around the world. That's the vision of Purposeful; to bring a feminist convening together, to say, Let's discuss, let's push together, let's call for changes.

And at that conference, the President of Sierra Leone announced that the cabinet, with his approval, will now put forward a safe mother bill that will decriminalize abortion in Sierra Leone, and that will guarantee choices for women. That's a part of our work. We believe you need to organize the movements, organize people who think like us, and people who don't. This is a big part of our work. To organize the movements. We do that here; we do that as well around the world with the global feminist movement that's thriving and the people that we give our money to. 

And finally, we have active policy work that seeks to change policy. Purposeful helped to create a movement here called the Black Tuesday Movement that helped push this country to declare rape a national emergency and change rape laws and create specialized rape courts and do a lot of other reforms, we were in the middle of that. Not just pushing forward, but also writing those reforms. We write policy, we work with governments to change policy. Prime example, here in Sierra Leone, the government had banned pregnant girls from going to school. We led the opposition to this while working with other partners, we sued the government, we pushed back, we led petitions against the government, but then we were also drafting policy around the issue – something that is unique of Purposeful: we don't just shout outside - we're also in the room. We wrote the national signature policy for the education ministry in Sierra Leone, a radical inclusion in education policy that guarantees that pregnant girls, disabled and children from poor communities can all have access to education. We wrote that policy here at Purposeful.

It's an example of how our work is crystallized. We do all these things: the money, the movement building, but we're also in the room to write and to shift policy. We've written policies for governments; we have worked on changing different laws and policies. I was personally hired to write the National Youth Policy in this country, I was a national lead consultant for that.

IBelieve that

You must be a Pan-Africanist and a feminist at the same time. You cannot be a feminist if you do not understand that patriarchy is tied to capitalism and capitalism is tied to colonialism.

Chernor Bah

And finally, I'll add, embodying our values. So that's how we work with women and change our own internal practices at Purposeful to show that the world we imagine, the decolonized world where women and girls are living in full power, is the world that we also embody. How do we pay, how do we promote, how do we treat people? 

How do you define power? 

Power is complex, but essentially, it’s the ability to control. Ability to influence and shape and dominate. It's visible and invisible. It’s most potent when it’s invisible and when taken for granted. 

How can this revolution and movement attract and bring allies onboard? 

We understand that ultimately this revolution is going to need everybody. And the point of a revolution is to create openings for people to join at different phases. And I personally don't believe in exclusion. I don't believe that we should just shut the door, or we should judge people based on where they are. We're all socialized differently, and people are at different stations in their life.

For example, we had a chief who was a polygamist, he married five wives. But this chief decided that in this community, he was going to personally give scholarships to girls and support girls in these very, uh, conservative districts where no girls had graduated from high school. And he was going to support girls by giving them scholarships to go study and come back and develop his community.

He had found his awakening. Now, if we judge the chief just because the chief is a polygamist, then we have no chance to engage and change that society. But just by that act, just by the example of his belief in education, that chief was showing us that there was hope and it was an opportunity.

So, a chief like that, we recruit them, we work with him, we train him, and we support him to interact with other chiefs, to share why he believes in girls’ education. And that's how you build a revolution. We must engage people, I do that a lot with my friends, if you don’t, you create a feeling of exceptionalism, people then think that - Yes, Chernor is a feminist because he's been to the West! Because he has lived in New York.

Would you agree that for the past few years, there’s been a strong backlash on feminist movement and agenda? 

There's always been a strong feminism backlash. There are conversations about how the future we want will leave boys out and boys behind. In fact, I remember talking to a group of boys in a village outside of Freetown, and they told me that because all your programs are for girls, that this was the exact reason why they go out there and impregnate them, as a response. We want to show you that you should come talk to us because we have the power, we have the control, and some men who are married to these girls will beat them, will take their money, so that’s the reality of an extreme form of that backlash. And it's kind of like the male Lives Matter backlash. But I think that it misses the point, the point of a feminist revolution is that when girls are free, we are all free. I think Nelson Mandela said that “I'm not fighting for black domination or white domination; I'm fighting for equality”. The reality today is there is domination of girls. That's the reality. And it's not just about laws, it's also about practices. It's about the fact that now you ask any average family, including in this city, what's your preference for a child?

Is it a boy or a girl? Overwhelmingly, it's a boy. Families prefer boys and that's the foundation of all discrimination. Because that leads to how resources are allocated, even how your birth is celebrated, what schools you chose to go to. And then the things you have to contend with in life, sexual violence, just your body being sexualized and used as essentially a credit card for anything you want to navigate in this world. Those are the reality. And those are not natural. They are socialized systems that we have created that lead to this aggression on the female body throughout their existence, from birth onwards. Now, we can accept that as a reality and say we want to change that, and the way we change that is by investing in girls so that we create a different world, a different system where we have girls come to the people who say that all men are going to be left behind,

An argument often leveled against what you just said is that if we’re only investing in girls, boys will be left behind. 

I say check out Africa. Who are our presidents? There are no women presidents. I can only think of one or two here and there. Who are the CEOs? Who are the leaders of companies in whatever industries you choose? This is the reality of the evidence in front of our eyes. And the way to change that is intentional investment over time. It does not mean that men and boys should be cut out.

I'm a father of just boys. I don't think nor believe that. But the reality is when resources are meant for everybody, they tend to then go more to boys. We are for the state and everybody providing resources to the general public, but we also know that historically when it has been meant for everybody, it has not gotten to girls and that's what we're trying to change.

I think the primary principle of feminism is a commitment to justice. So, equality, but rooted in an understanding of history and context and the history and the context is that girls and women have been disadvantaged and that inequality is not an accident. It's because we have a system in place that discriminates against women and girls.

Being a feminist is about a commitment to justice, a commitment to equality, commitment to fairness. And I know sometimes people misunderstand fairness as 50/50. That's not if you have had 90% of the pie all over the time. 50/50 is not going to be fair. Fairness is going to be equitable. So, you give what you need so that we get to a point of true equilibrium which I think is the goal.

So, I think that those are the fundamental principles. But I also believe that feminism does not exist in isolation of core human rights, a commitment to justice and equality for all. So we talk a lot about intersectional feminism that you have to see not just this commitment to these values, but you've got to see the world and the institutions and the structures that create and perpetuate injustice and inequality.

What’s the one principle that has kept Purposeful going and standing?

What has kept purposeful going is that we have been very clear about our politics. We've been very clear about ideology. We're the first known major organization in this country that named itself feminist. This is a 70% Muslim majority country, extremely conservative. We put on our name the word feminist when we are launching, we said we are feminist. We invite the critic, we say, this is who we are. That's our politics. And that's important for how we raise funds, who we engage, how we partner with folks and the issues we take on. And we were never shy to tackle difficult issues.

What would you say is the most significant achievement of Purposeful? 

I know this will sound cliche, but the most significant achievement of Purposeful is the culture we have created. It's the team. It was the hardest thing to do, to recruit the right sort of people, to build a culture because everything else comes from the culture that we have. We truly have a feminist culture, young dynamic people who are now owning the space. You no longer need to hear from me, they are leading. One of the first colleagues we hired, who is now a 29-year-old feminist champion, is currently studying in Sussex on a full Purposeful scholarship. Now, you don't hear that from a local organization here. That we pay for our team members to go study in the West when they get accepted into universities, and we give them full scholarships. 

As of this week, we're now officially a four day a week organization. At Purposeful, you only work from Monday to Thursday and Friday, you can go back and do whatever the hell you want to do with your life. And that's something we're proud of. We give the most generous parental leave you know, paid parental leave. You can take up to a year off if you want to. Most people take a minimum of six months, all guaranteed pay during that time. We hire people who are eight months pregnant and still give them full parental leave. That's what we're most proud of.  It’s that we're able to build an institution that embodies the world that we imagine. 

We're also very proud of the ways we've been able to mobilize resources at Purposeful. We're very lucky to be in partnership with progressive donors who share in our feminist ideals and beliefs and who give us the flexibility to move money in the ways that the formal and informal groups of women we serve want. We've been very lucky here at Purposeful to raise significant resources. Our annual budget is now around $6 million, but we know that this is not our money, we’re just custodians of the money that belongs to girls. That belongs to feminist groups and activists. And we are eager to move that money to them in the ways that they want. It's our goal in this world; to move as much money as we can to girls and feminist groups in the ways that they want it.

View fullsize

As much as you’re a stout feminist, you’re also a firm Pan-Africanist, tell us more. 

I absolutely believe that you must be a Pan-Africanist and a feminist at the same time. That's why I talk about: Intersectional feminism. You cannot be a feminist if you do not understand that patriarchy is tied to capitalism and capitalism is tied to colonialism.

You must be against all these things because they are very much interconnected. Patriarchal forces are propped up by capitalistic forces, and capitalistic forces take their roots in colonialism. They are the same things. They are connected. It’s the system that treats the other as not human enough, that treats black, brown bodies as less, that treats us as commodities and if you are a feminist who's interested in uprooting and smashing the patriarchy, you will be interested in smashing colonial powers.

And that's what Pan-Africanism is about. It's about finding our own voice, it's about the African being a full human. Just as feminism is about females being full human beings with the ability to chart their own path, their own future. 

What are the most critical issues facing girls and women today in Sierra Leone?

The most critical issues confronting girls and women in this country are: One, cultural violence. There is cultural violence that permeates our society, whether it's transactional sex, teenage pregnancy, female genital mutilation, it's just a violent place for girls to exist. 

The second one, I would say, is voice. It’s having their voice and agency, it’s the permission to speak up for themselves, it's believing that their voices matter in society. And it's hard because our institutions of politics are still dominated by men. The community institutions are dominated by men, the traditional institutions are dominated by men. It's seeing themselves in those spaces and being able to claim and be part of those spaces.

The third one, I would say, is power. Having real access to power, being and living in their full power, where girls and women are leading. People who control power are still men and they've treated power as if it's exclusive to them. They’ve shut down the doors of power to girls.  

All these three things are manifested and embedded in our systems. In our laws, in our practices, in our traditions. Violence is just everyday existence. We still have child marriage laws and the anti-abortion laws are still in our books. So, those three things, violence, voice, and full power are the trinity of the challenges that we need to confront, to create the future that we imagine.

What is your vision for Sierra Leone?

My vision for Sierra Leone as a country is a society where every citizen is treated and respected for the awesome human being that they are, and they can live in their full power. My vision for my country is a feminist future, a future where girls are not surviving but thriving, where you don't have to worry about the existence of violence, of female genital mutilation and courting, of child marriage, of teenage pregnancy, of being criminalized for the choices that they make over their bodies. It's a future where girls can go to school and be anything that they want to be, not just in theory, but in practice. Where it's not news that a girl can grow up and become president. Where it becomes mundane that girls and women are CEO’s running this country alongside men. That's the future we walk towards. That's the future we're trying to build at Purposeful.  And I believe that this future is possible and that it's happening.