Deadline: April 24, 2026
Applications are open for the Sawaba Fellowship 2026. The Sawaba fellowship, hosted by Liberation Alliance Africa, creates space for researchers, thinkers, artists, practitioners, activists, writers, journalists, and community organisers to engage in reflection and experience-based discourse, research, and knowledge production on key topics in pursuit of decolonial feminist futures.
The Sawaba fellowship embodies scholarly components and personal and collective explorations on liberation, critical consciousness, and anti-colonial feminist solidarity. Four fellows of African descent who reside on the continent will be selected. The fellowship will begin with a three-day residential retreat in an accessible location on the African continent.
2026 Fellowship Theme: Not Pioneers of an Empty Land
Liberation Alliance Africa invites fellows to explore their practice guided by the theme, “Not Pioneers of an Empty Land”. This theme constitutes a direct confrontation with the colonial legal and psychological myth that the world was empty before European expansion, and it encourages explorations that reinforce and exalt truth over colonial lies and logics. These colonial myths show up in current practices as a rejection of collective knowing and flourishing, and despair. This rejection casts us as agents of our own erasure, particularly in the age of digital and social media, where humanity, attention and dignity are increasingly monetised, feeding the race to be a lone voice, a subject-matter expert, a lone pioneer, a knowledge magician conjuring ideas from thin air.
Not Pioneers of an Empty Land acknowledges the ancestral preservation of memory, stories, genealogies, and histories that have existed and continue to exist. This fellowship invites us to think beyond colonial epistemic, political, emotional, and psychological borders and to reclaim the shared kingdoms, mutual interests, and ecological stewardship that existed long before the cartography of dispossession and the imposition of the nation-states.
Benefits
- Fellows will receive a USD $500 monthly stipend for the duration of the fellowship to cover project expenses.
Eligibility
- Fellows may be artists, academics, journalists, documentarians, thinkers, playwrights, poets, architects, urban planners, novelists, cultural workers, or practitioners in other fields.
- They are critical and futurist voices with deep analysis of normative concepts such as justice, equality, rights, climate, identity, and community, transcending the limitations of contemporary thought and discourse.
- Successful applicants will be deeply rooted in decolonial feminist politics, anti-imperialist solidarity, feminist world-building, and epistemic liberation, while being well-versed in regional and global issues.
Application
The fellowship application can be sent to [email protected]. This requires a cover letter, a portfolio, a project description (maximum of three pages) and a draft project budget.
Fellowship applications must be received no later than 24th April 2026
For more information, visit Sawaba Fellowship.
