All “isms” are born with a fatal defect. It is in that, being products of fallen humanity, they contain not only the purity of their originally intended meanings, but the distortions, misinterpretations, and egos of actual people that propagate them, kill for them, or are impacted by them.
Wear the badge of capitalism: we might ask you why your ism makes it possible for billionaire wealth to sometimes increase at the rate of $10 billion a day, while millions go without basic medical insurance. Pose as a socialist: we might ask why your ism, or its purported representation in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, resulted in shortages of essential commodities and loss of freedom for ordinary people, not to mention the pogroms. Even self-aware Christians might sometimes be caught observing how if the Lord Jesus Christ were to incarnate in our midst come Monday morning, He might not identify with much that is being done by the institution of Christianity.
So, in a world where isms and labels come at us freighted with this irredeemable vulnerability, just how much courage and personal moral conviction would it have taken for Everjoice J. Win, 12 February 1965 – 9 March 2025 (EJ, as she was widely known) to live a life the conclusion of which could be marked by many without equivocation, as the life of a feminist? And what precisely did she mean by her feminism?
In 1999, five years, at that point, into our friendship and successive professional collaborations with Everjoice, my wife shared with me that, on a visit she had paid EJ at her home in Johannesburg, she had seen her name and my name, and our phone numbers, neatly typed up and held under a magnet on EJ’s fridge. They were, or in time were set to be, among names of her family, like Fungwa’s, or her friends like Ennie Chipembere, Sophia Nyamudeza, Teresa Mugadza, Deprose Muchena, Bella Matambanadzo, Brian Kagoro, and others – that would be put up on the refrigerator for those in EJ’s household to call in the event that they couldn’t reach her.
“Okay, so, this is a serious friendship, right?”, I responded. “I guess we should live up to it.” We had found a bigger sister.
Having been up on that fridge under that magnet, our children having played together, our families visiting each other, and having from time to time collaborated professionally over 30 years, I am moved to offer this reflection on EJ’s feminism, and I also believe it is important to do so from the standpoint of a man.
I first met Everjoice in Harare around 1995 when I was working for the ecumenical movement, and she had attended a meeting of church leaders where she heard me talk about what under the World Council of Churches had already been inaugurated back in 1988 as the “Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women”. Everjoice was then preparing for her participation in the landmark United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women of September 1995, the big conference that, after its venue, became colloquially known as “Beijing”.
She said she wanted to engage more on the “thought leadership” (it was my first time to hear the phrase) that she had heard in my speech. “We are broadening the universe of ideas on women’s human rights, ideas that can move our society forward”, she said. “And so I am harvesting and channeling any helpful original thoughts that I can get as I scan around. Let’s talk.”
And so it was that, within a short period of time thereafter, Everjoice had increased her footprint of engagement with churches and church leaders, connecting them into her various bases and networks past and then current, including Women in Law and Development in Africa, Women’s Action Group, Women and AIDS Support Network, and the Association for Women’s Rights in Development.
In those engagements, a unique convergence of qualities from her background, personality, and skills, came in handy.
To appreciate these, let us for a moment draw directly from her own voice when she recently spoke with Awino Okech at the Feminist Center for Racial Justice podcast. Telling the story of how in 1989 she initially merely “stumbled” upon what became a life-long engagement with the stories of dispossessed and marginalized women when she worked with (now) Professor Terri Barnes who was then studying, as an African American scholar, for her PhD at the University of Zimbabwe, and was working on urban histories of women, it is clear that Everjoice’s absorption of the stories women told in those oral histories clearly went beyond academic process. Her empathy, humanity, and abiding sense of justice come through as she remembers, including when she recites the story of a woman from Chihota communal lands who spoke of having been mistreated and hounded out of her village:
“I remember one statement she made – she said, back then a woman was like a donkey; it didn’t have a name. Now, having grown up in a rural area, to me it actually made sense. Cows had names; cattle had names. Donkeys didn’t, they were just called ‘donkey’. Everyone’s donkey was just called ‘donkey’. And so, I started appreciating what this meant.”
It all “started coming together”, Everjoice says on that legacy podcast, as in those moments listening to those stories she could see how the economic history she had studied, the gender-based violence she had witnessed in her community growing up, the disinheritance of women from rural land that was common around her village – how all these seemed to congeal into a globule of blood, mucus and tears that required the labors of an entire lifetime to deal with.
What rapidly enhanced her impact was the combination evident in her telling of those stories of her early career: a mind that could ferret out injustice from a mile away; a heart that was soft for humanity and hard against abusers; hands that could organize and command the pen with grace; and a mouth that could speak with so much native fluency in English, Shona and Ndebele that if it spoke those languages from behind a curtain and you were asked to guess at each turn whence the person who was speaking hailed, you might be forgiven for naming “Oxfordshire, Charumbira, and Tsholotsho”, respectively.
A key theme for Everjoice at that point early in her career was violence against women. She had been part of the global founding of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, when she participated in 1991 in the first Women’s Global Leadership Institute, held by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University.
During one of the 16 days episodes in the 1990s, I recall she organized a public tribunal on intimate partner violence, where real-life cases of women were heard at a symbolic public trial in Harare, in which she had invited Minister Eddison Zvobgo, (now) Justice Elizabeth Gwaunza, and myself, to serve as the three judges presiding over the demonstrative trials, our role being essentially to listen to the women’s testimonies and at the end provide didactic remarks on the scourge of gender-based violence and what needed to be done legislatively, judicially, educationally and otherwise, to stop it. The sight of one woman who hobbled to the podium with a leg that could no longer bend at the knee as a result of the brutal beatings that she testified she had received from her estranged husband as well as the corrective surgery that she had to go through, still haunts me to this day.
Other themes of Everjoice’s work during that period included protection of women against rape; work against the disinheritance of widows, that is, the Neria film theme; women’s access to justice; child support for women; political participation and decision-making; and protection of the girl child including from child “marriage”.
When we established the NCA as, then, a broad front for national constitutional activism, Everjoice, as a founder member, was a key part of our efforts. Professionally, she also led in various other spaces as a manager, program leader, human rights defender and pro-democracy activist, including at the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, at the Center for Civil Society of the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, in the Zimbabwe operations of Oxfam Canada, and at Just Associates.
Still, the crowning glory of Everjoice’s leadership was to come with her growing global portfolio, in the latter years of her life. Starting with her stint as Commonwealth Technical Advisor at South Africa’s then newly-established Commission on Gender Equality, where we happened to have offices in the same building in Braamfontein, Everjoice’s global influence grew to include a role and brief stint at Sussex University, a Professor of Practice role at SOAS at the University of London, and the Executive Directorship of the Shine Campaign/Shine Collab. In the latter, it was inspiring to see how she pivoted into a sophisticated policy wonk in the specialized area of energy and climate change, while unfailingly retaining a feminist lens in her advocacy and other engagements.
Even then, Action Aid International was perhaps the global stage on which she moved most of her outcomes. Over several years in global portfolios that included international lead for women’s rights, as well as the Programs and Global Engagement Director role, Everjoice was able to utilize the vast network and reach – in Asia, Africa, and Latin America – of Action Aid, making a significant and positive difference to the way staff, partners, governments and corporates thought about and worked on women’s human rights.
Where I started is where I should now end. Now, I am not qualified to know what feminism means or must mean, and I generally remain tentative about isms and labels. But what I can say is, I saw Everjoice, who often introduced herself to audiences as a feminist, dedicating her life to giving women and girls dignity and encouraging – and where needed, forcing – men to care about, to protect, to respect, and to refrain from harming women. I saw her having the self-awareness, the humility and the agility to work with diverse constituencies – churches, traditional leaders, governments, policy specialists, legislators, UN leaders, and so on – giving them the tools, the insights, the horizons, to advance women’s rights and protect women from being killed, maimed and raped, from being whipped and ostracized out of villages because some tsikamutanda has accused them of witchcraft, from being “married” off at ages so tender that they are permanently deformed by obstetric fistula, from being denied an education because it is supposedly a losing investment for their natal families, and so on.
I didn’t hear about Everjoice advocating for men to be castrated. Or for men to be less than women. I saw her dedicating her life to the labor of love of women’s human rights. I saw and heard her unfailing humor and joie de vivre in her friendships. I heard her occasionally dropping for her friends a random voice note of her singing Shona and Ndebele church hymns. I even imagined her bargaining with God to let her see through International Women’s Day (IWD) and summon her soul as dusk fell upon IWD. In short, if I may borrow from the title of her book with Terri Barnes, I really only ever witnessed Everjoice dedicating her life to a relatable quest, for her people and for humanity…”to live a better life”.
Tawanda Mutasah and Sharai Zvarevashe Mutasah were family friends of EJ Win.
