“I feel as though I have lived many lives within my lifetime,” says the human rights crusader and social movement activist. She has also been a child bride, a mother of seven, out of which only one child survived to adulthood. She has struggled for space and legitimacy as a woman within patriarchal social and economic systems.

“In a sense, Africa and I are twins,” she says, “I was born in the time after the end of the second world war, when African soldiers returned from far away lands to regale their country men and women with vivid tales that wiped out the myth of the colonialists’ superiority.

Born to a young mother in 1958, the events in the immediate time after her birth perplexed the close-knit conservative community because there was no precedent. Her father abandoned his wife and new-born daughter and was never seen or heard of again.

“No one knew how to deal with this situation,” adds Fatma thoughtfully, “Ours must have been the first case of abandonment and was considered a terrible tragedy then.”

Fatma’s mother remarried and moved to Mombasa with her new husband. She went on to have five sons with whom Fatma has maintained close ties. However, little Fatma was left in the care of her mother’s sister who raised her to teenage and who stood by her in adulthood until her recent demise.

“Although she was not my birth mother, my mother’s sister was my real mother in every sense and I was heartbroken when she died,” reminisces Fatma, “Ours was a poverty-stricken background but she showered me with unconditional love, and taught me to be strong to weather the storms of life.”

She has taken on various causes for human rights and justice for the oppressed within Tanzania and other parts of Africa for the better part of three decades, but Fatma prefers to define herself foremost as a builder of African social movements - a gift she credits to her interactions with the leaders and foot soldiers of the liberation struggles of Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa with whom she freely mingled during the different times of their exile in Dar es Salaam throughout the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

Fatma draws her inspiration from the late founding president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere who once asked his country men and women a simple question: ‘How would you like to be remembered?’

“My answer to this question is, I would like to be remembered for trying,” says Fatma, “The lessons I have learned teach me that one is not born into a movement, rather it is the experiences that have made me what I am today.”

By the mid 1970s, Fatma was a young married woman in her twenties, a mother and student. She says of herself: “I came into being in the 70s at the University of Dar es Salaam.”

Her adoptive parents arranged for her marriage at age 15 because the times were uncertain and there was a lot of violence following the revolution in Zanzibar following Tanzania’s independence.

“I am sure they did it to enhance my chances in life, but these were extremely difficult and dangerous times for families in Zanzibar,” she remembers.

Amidst the tumult of the revolution, the newly wed couple left for the United Kingdom: “I arrived in London when it was really cold, and here I was dressed like a typical Mzanzibari in light clothing and sandals,” she reminisces.

But the whole experience blew her young mind away because in colonial Tanganyika and Zanzibar Fatma had never seen white people doing manual work. Such chores were strictly reserved for the natives, yet here they were in their own country, sweeping the streets, cleaning floors and windows!

“My mind was spluttering: ‘Mbona hawa wazungu wanafanya kazi?’ (Why are these white people working?).

This encounter in the UK got her thinking deeply about race issues and it gave a new meaning to the first wave of African independence that was unfolding before her eyes.

“All the liberation movements of the continent were at home in Dar es Salaam and the late President Julius Nyerere’s teachings were on people’s lips. These were heady and youthful days,” she enthuses.

She started to think about making these ideological positions meaningful to ordinary women and men in Tanzania and Africa. One day, after a period of partner abuse and neglect, her house help showed up bruised and battered on Fatma’s doorstep.

Fatma was outraged and she would not rest until justice could be done for the battered woman.

“After the police and the courts had done their work and on the strength of a tiny loan I gave her to improve her situation, I watched this woman being transformed right before my eyes,” says Fatma, “She went on to buy a plot of land, build herself a house and two adjacent rooms to rent out.”

But the biggest transformation took place within the woman’s family and community: “The moment she took control over her livelihood, she stopped being a victim and became a victor and role model for her children and the men and women in her community – someone to be proud of and to emulate,” adds Fatma.

Little did she know that this incident would act as the trigger to her life of activism. Fatma’s list of achievements is as wide as it is impressive with her roots in the foundation of the Tanzania Media Women’s Association (TAMWA), which she led for close to a decade.

Among her personal accomplishments is in scooping up the MNET award for 1999 for her documentary on khanga cloth and her leadership roles in both the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) and Zanzibar Women on the Net (ZaWoN). She is also a member of the African Social Forum Council, based in Dakar, Senegal.

In 1979, a group of young women, fresh graduates of the journalism school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania began to meet informally as they compared their experiences of working and covering issues in the mainstream media. This was long before the age of liberalized media and new information communication technologies (ICTs).

The result of these consultations was the joint production of radio programmes discussing the issues of schoolgirl pregnancies in Tanzania’s social context.

The reaction from the public was enthusiastic to say the least, and the women journalists were inspired to produce another set of radio programmes dealing with violence against women. However their enthusiasm was dampened by their bosses – invariably men – who thought that domestic violence was not a serious enough issue to be discussed on public radio. Their programme was never broadcast and the women were demoralized by that experience. It was seven years later when they regrouped in 1986.

“By 1987, women journalists were questioning their roles within the media houses in Tanzania, and finding out that they were not immune from policies that excluded them from exercising their capabilities fully,” explains Fatma, “That is how TAMWA was born.”

She and her colleagues took the unbeaten path to create space for women’s issues and to engage in advocacy work for women’s rights. This put them on a coalition course with their bosses – at a time when media was largely either state owned or tightly controlled.

“When the doors were shut on our stories in our organizations, we opened windows of opportunity for ourselves by publishing our own magazine and producing radio programmes from our perspective.”

Riding on the wave of pluralism sweeping across Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s, TAMWA were stepping out of the traditional news moulds to make the link between policy and practice in the social affairs of Tanzania. They rolled up their sleeves and tackled issues of domestic violence, sexual harassment of women in the streets and workplace and the underlying reasons for the great numbers of girls dropping out of school because of pregnancies.

“We began to give legal literacy programmes but the women who participated pushed us headlong into activism because they were asking, ‘So what if I know my rights? Where do I go when I face violence in my house?”

These questions resulted in the birth of the Crisis Centre in a heavily populated neighbourhood of Dar es Salaam.

“In 1989 we mobilized our members and sympathisers by typing out one letter, photocopied it and sent out as many copies as possible and hoped they would show up to support our cause,” she said.

Fatma is a firm believer in investing in a new image for Africa: “We need to create our own images, and this is what I do with a passion at ZIFF – the Festival of the Dhows,” she says.

The dhow is an ancient sea-faring vessel, powered by the monsoon winds that have facilitated trade, commerce and ideas across the Indian Ocean for centuries. Favourite themes of the festival are cultural diversity, individual integrity, social justice, women, children, the diaspora, culture and conservation.

The Festival of the Dhows concentrates on the creation of African images, using history as the building blocks even as it celebrates cultures of the dhow countries that are bound together by the Indian Ocean from Africa to the Arabian Gulf States, Iran, India and the Indian Ocean Islands. But it also creates awareness on the impact of globalization on these countries.

Fatma’s pet project is the women’s panorama within the festival that show-cases African heroines, and a diversity of work in the medium of visual arts and theatre a slot for enacting the living history of women.

“The most powerful forms of media for African women to access are radio, theatre arts and television,” says Fatma, “When we started TAMWA, there was no television on the mainland in Tanzania, because the late president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, believed that a society that cannot create its own images should not be dominated by other images.”

According to Fatma, Nyerere’s prescriptions have been swept aside by the present day market realities and a paradigm shift from the old policies that advocated for tight media controls.

Is there room for the traditional media forms to co-exist with the new media and technologies?

Fatma is exited at the possibilities for building social movements in Tanzania through media. The Theatre Arts faculty of the University of Dar es Salaam and the Bagamoyo School of Arts are churning out young people who are not afraid to marry tradition with modernity to produce street theatre, community theatre and film production.

For Fatma, the struggle is never really over: “When I think of my life, I marvel that I grew up at a time when there were no telephones on my island but in one lifetime things have changed so phenomenally that today I have a cell phone in my hand to make and receive calls or to play games with and the world is accessible to me at the touch of a computer button.”

As a council member of the influential African Social Forum (ASF) that sits in Dakar, Senegal she played an important role in the World Social Forum that took place in Nairobi in January. She is also a firm believer in the spirit of pan-Africanism and that the future of African social movements is in the hands of community and grassroots organisation.

“African can never be the same again,” says Fatma, “It is right to talk about what has gone wrong on the continent, but it is better still when people organize to do something about it.”

Fatma is optimistic that the WSF’s East African presence will feed into a continental and global consciousness to create a new world order that is fair, just and inclusive and spring board for positive and widespread social and economic change.