Qualitative Inquiry 2017, Vol. 23(2) 107–118 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077800416660577 journals.sagepub.com/home/qix Article Africana Feminism Inspired by endarkened transnational feminist praxis (Dillard & Okpalaoka, 2011), there is an exciting body of literature in the field that is broadly characterized as Africana feminism that has identified a perspective, a gen- dered lens, for myriad purposes (Gaidzanwa, 1997; Mama, 2002; Zerai, 2014). The first and most important reason to articulate this woman-centered perspective has been to cre- ate a safe space for women to occupy on their own terms and in the context of male-dominated social structures (Imam, Mama, & Sow, 1997). It has helped to legitimate the languages, discourses, challenges, unique perspectives, divergent experiences, and intersecting oppressions and privileges of African women’s and girls’ lives. In this arti- cle, we draw upon Assata Zerai’s (2014) emerging Africana feminist methodology (AFM) to guide an exploratory dis- cussion of women’s health scholarship and activism in Zimbabwe. Our central argument is that though economic sanctions, state violence, crumbling infrastructure, and lack of access to health care have undermined child health in Zimbabwe, African women have worked to provide health and healing to their children both directly by caring for them and indirectly through scholarship and activism. The sociological problem that this research addresses is that Western researchers often do not incorporate the voices of African women in their research endeavors; and a serious engagement in women’s health activism in Zimbabwe can- not happen without this preliminary step. Building from Franz Fanon (1963) and Lewis Gordon (2006), Reiland Rabaka (2010) refers to this as epistemic apartheid, “a pro- cess of critical decay within a field or discipline” due to its lack of intellectual diversity. This includes “institutional racism, academic colonization and conceptual quarantining of knowledge, anti-imperial thought, and/or radical political praxis produced and presented by . . . ‘especially black’ intellectual-activists” (Rabaka, 2010, p. 16). To Rabaka’s description, we add “especially” Africana (and other non- western) women intellectual-activists. We ask, how do we engage the scholarship and activism of African women to ensure that their voices and perspectives inform research on health and social development, especially when this research is focused on African contexts? We propose an Africana feminist approach to promote intellectual diversity 660577QIX XX X 10.1177/1077800416660577Qualitative InquiryZerai et al. research-article 2016 1 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA 2 California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, USA 3 College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA Corresponding Author: Assata Zerai, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign, 702 S. Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Email: azerai@illinois.edu A Proposal for Expanding Endarkened Transnational Feminist Praxis: Creating a Database of Women’s Scholarship and Activism to Promote Health in Zimbabwe Assata Zerai 1 , Joanna Perez 2 , and Chenyi Wang 1,3 Abstract Western researchers often do not incorporate the voices of African women in their research endeavors; and a serious engagement in women’s health activism in Zimbabwe cannot happen without this preliminary step. Endarkened feminist epistemologies have theorized a social science that refuses to sidestep African women’s perspectives. As a corrective to conceptual quarantining of Black (African and African diasporic) feminist thought, the exciting body of literature in the field broadly characterized as Africana feminism has helped to legitimate the languages, discourses, challenges, unique perspectives, divergent experiences, and intersecting oppressions and privileges of African women’s and girls’ lives. In this article, we develop an emerging Africana feminist methodology to propose building a scholarship and activism database as well as guide an exploratory discussion of health activism in Zimbabwe. Keywords African studies, feminist studies, gender, Afrocentric feminist epistemologies, feminist methodologies, methodologies, non- Western epistemologies, decolonizing the academy, pedagogy, counter-narrative, politics and culture