Sokari Ekine | |
Alma Mater: | UCL Institute of Education |
Occupation: | Activist, blogger, author,lecturer |
Known For: | Women's rights, LGBTI rights and environmental campaigns |
Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian activist,[1] blogger[2] [3] and author. She worked as a journalist at the Pambazuka News and has also written for Feminist Africa and New Internationalist. Ekine kept a blog between 2004 and 2014 in which she covered a number of topics including LGBTI rights, women's rights, and environmental issues. She has co-written or edited four books, and taught English to school children in Haiti.
Ekine has edited the books Blood and Oil: Testimonies of Violence from Women of the Niger Delta (2001),[4] SMS Uprising: Mobile Phone Activism in Africa (2010),[5] African Awakenings with Firoze Manji (2011), and Queer African Reader with Hakima Abbas (2013).
Ekine was born in Nigeria to a Nigerian father and British mother. She grew up in Nigeria but moved to England to attend college.[6] She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in new technology and a Master of Arts degree in rights in education from the Institute of Education at the University of London.
Ekine lived in the United States for a number of years before returning to the UK, where she found work as a further education lecturer.[6] [7] Her first venture online was in 1995 when she founded the Black Sisters Network email list.[8] Ekine was treated for cancer in 2000, a factor in her move to Spain with her partner in 2004.[6]
Ekine wrote a weekly column for the Pambazuka News for nine years and served as their online editor in 2007.[7] She began writing a blog, Black Looks, in 2004, which she continued for ten years.[9] Common writing topics were LGBTI rights in Africa, gender identity, militarisation, human rights, art, the oil industry in the Niger Delta, Haiti, activism. and land rights.[9] She began Black Looks 2 in 2014, a new blog focused on her photographic work.
Ekine is a social justice activist,[1] being involved in campaigning for more than 20 years.[10]
Ekine has also written for Feminist Africa and New Internationalist.[10] She has written of the struggles of women against state forces and oil companies in the militarised and environmentally damaged Niger Delta.[11] Ekine visited Haiti as online editor of Pambazuka News in 2007[12] to meet with women organizers for Fanmi Lavalas.[13]
In 2003 she was awarded an International Reporting Project fellowship from Johns Hopkins University and commissioned to write on health care in the country.[7] [9] She subsequently worked in Port-au-Prince teaching English in high schools for non-governmental organisation Growing Haiti.[10]
Ekine was international representative for Niger Delta Women for Justice.[4]
In 2016, Ekine began working on a photographic narrative entitled Spirit Desire: Resistance, Imagination and Sacred Memories in Haitian Vodoun.
From an excerpt in SMS Uprising: Mobile Phone Activism in Africa:
"For social change to take place technology needs to be appropriate and rooted in local knowledge."