Rights activist and development consultant, Ayesha Kajee was the former director of South Africa’s Freedom of Expression Institute and founding director of the International Human Rights Exchange Program at Wits University. Currently a Research Fellow at AFRASID, she has lectured in Politics, International Relations and Human Rights. Research interests include gender justice, political economy and transitional justice.
Ayesha writes and commentates for various media, including The Globalist and al-Jazeera. Her fiction and non-fiction writing appears in several journals and anthologies, most recently Taxi Through Mzansi. She is the editor of Designing Democracy, which examines the post-millennium political change in sub-Saharan Africa. Ayesha’s essay Sagal placed 3rd in the 2021 IHRAF Awards, and her poem Silence won 2nd prize in the 2021 UN-aligned competition.