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
Pregs Govender on the human right to clean water and the corporations who pollute,
waste and steal water in a capitalist world that drives inequality, poverty & war
21 South African Icons video adapted for 2nd edition of Love and Courage, A Story of Insubordination
"Love and Courage is a guide for those deeply committed to social justice and radical transformation of our societies, economies, our world and ourselves. With Thousand Currents we distributed Pregs' book to hundreds of activists and revolutionaries, to Black Lives Matter leaders. Immigrant rights leaders, domestic worker organisers, artists and cultural workers, to the Water Protectors at Standing Rock and more…we worked hard to make sure it was easily available for the thousands of feminists at the AWID Conference...because the depths of crises we are facing globally right now – the rise of white supremacist xenophobic, misogynist leaders – demand we respond with the most courageous and principled leadership imaginable."
Pamela Shifman, Feminist & Internationalist
Why now?
"I want to incite insubordination in each of us. Like you, I have felt the fear, greed and hate of subordination land on my skin, course through my blood, unsettle my nerves… its paralysis, impotent rage and helplessness… In searching for answers I looked to and learnt from so many who embody wisdom in their lives, their relationship to others and to the earth. There is wisdom in the everyday beauty of fragile complex beings grappling with contradiction…Recognising love as intrinsic to our being we evoke the courage to dance with our fear… When we forget, as we often do, we can look in the mirror of our selves, of each other, or let the rising sun remind us
of the radiance that is our birthright." Read more...
Why Love,
Courage & Insubordination?
... the radiance
that is our birthright...
Reflections: Ahmed Kathrada, Agnes Khoo-Dzisi, Keorepetse Kgositsile, Desiree Lewis, Graça Machel, Frank Meintjies, Koketso Moetsi, Siphokazi Mthathi, Kumi Naidoo & Gloria Steinem
Anti-Colonial Academic & Author: Life as the River Flows
"Pregs' perspective is needed for Asia-Africa solidarity based on mutual respect and understanding, rather than utilitarian economic exchanges or trade relations only."
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: AWID Workshop on Building Movements, Curriculum Workshop on Love and Courage, Insubordinate Leadership Lecture & the Queer and Trans Art-iculations Exhibition.
Feminist Writer,
African Women’s Development Fund
"Love and Courage is a precious contribution to our understanding of African liberation history... and leadership. We also learn the inner techniques of activism – of how to master breath, balance the body and find strength and joy in the midst of distress."
Womanist Author;
Executive Director: Wellesley Centres for Women
"Meditation is a powerful tool for self- and social transformation. It deserves a more prominent and unapologetic place in our social change repertoire. As Pregs recommends, we must find ways to 'communicat[e] the practice in being so people learn without being hindered by their socialization.'"
Chair: The Elders;
Ireland's First Woman President, UN High Commissioner Human Rights
"I'd like to finish with a passage Pregs used in relation to her personal journey: 'Life, as it waxes and wanes, always provides opportunities for our humanity to emerge.'
I have every confidence in South Africa realising the opportunities for its humanity to fully emerge."
“It is a brave and telling reflection on our contemporary history and opens the space for others to speak.”
Ahmed Kathrada
1929-2017
ANC Leader, Activist and ex-Robben Island Prisoner
Read More...
Honouring Ancestors
of Love, Courage & Insubordination
Thirteen-year-old Autumn Peltier's 2018 UN speech shares ancient wisdom about water, the earth and humanity. She calls us to "Warrior up..." knowing that, "One day I will be an ancestor, and I want my great-grand-children to know I tried hard to fight so they can have clean drinking water."
The global climate strikes inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg reconnect to the wisdom of indigenous people who cared for the earth before being decimated by colonial genocides. Visiting the water protectors of Standing Rock, Greta recognised that, "Indigenous peoples... are often the ones who are affected the most by the climate and ecological crisis, yet they are not the ones responsible for it. They are also the ones who are leading the fight against it. We are now so desperate for their voices and knowledge how to live in balance with nature."
Honouring Ancestors connects the past, present and future through lectures Pregs has delivered, including on Wangari Maathai, Ruth First, Victoria Mxenge and Julius Nyerere. Wangari Maathai was profiled at the time of COP 2019, to remind elected leaders that their loyalty is to the earth and her citizens, not to those whose greed for profit is destroying the earth and humanity. If the world heeds the wisdom of ancestors like Wangari, the earth's children, whose wealth was stolen from them, could play happily, their present and future secure.
Pregs reading Love and Courage, A Story of Insubordination to the late Nelson Rohlihlala Mandela.
"If 27 years in prison have done anything to us, it is to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact upon the way people live and die…" pg. 228
Pregs wrote an open letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa for Human Rights Day 2020, addressing the need to overcome inequality in SA in order to fight the spread of COVID-19
Pregs is featured in the new UNFPA publication Icons and activists: 50 Years of People Making Change
Yo-Yo Ma and Pregs after reading from Love and Courage at Zolani Mahola's family home in Langa, February 2020, for an intimate storytelling event:
Ilitha Labantu's 30th anniversary International Conference: Ensuring equal access to justice (27/11/2019); Pregs was invited to share her insights from the WNC, Parliament & SAHRC
Pregs presented COSATU's Winnie Mandela Memorial Lecture on the 25 November 2019, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, to launch the 16 Days of Activism campaign against gender based violence.
The University of Johannesburg (UJ) Council awarded Pregs the Ellen Kuzwayo Award
on 22 November 2019.
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