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- [00:00]
Podcast Host
Welcome to the Open Society Ideas Podcast, a project of the Ideas Workshop at the Open Society Foundations. We speak with thinkers and practitioners exploring unconventional and heterodox ideas from around the world. Each episode features authors who challenge assumptions, provoke new ways of thinking, and help us engage beyond borders. A member of the Ideas Workshop sits down with someone whose book invites listeners to expand our understanding of a myriad of important topics. To learn more and keep the conversation going, make sure to subscribe to the podcast feed or visit the ideasletter.org now pull up a chair and join the workshop.
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Aisha Osori
Hello everyone. I'm Aisha Osori, a director in Open Society Foundation's Ideas Workshop. Welcome to Open Society Ideas on the New Book Network Today we'll be talking with Mina Salami about her latest book, Can Feminism Be African? Mina Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of power. She formerly served as Program Chair and Senior Fellow at the New Institute, where she led the Black Feminism and Polycrisis program. Her work sits at the intersection of ideas, culture, and systems thinking, with a commitment to making complex theories accessible through books, essays, public speaking, and creative projects. She's the author of Sensuous A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, published by Bloomsbury in 2020, which has been translated into multiple languages. Her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies and and educational publications exploring feminism, African philosophy, media, and cultural criticism. She has been published in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Ideas Letter, Project Syndicate, and the Philosopher, and she has delivered talks at Global institutions including TEDx, the Institute of Arts and Ideas, the European Commission, Oxford and Cambridge Unions, Yale and Singularity University at NASA. For a more detailed bio on Mina, please head to the notes for this podcast. Welcome Mina, to the Open Society Ideas on the New Book Network, and very pleased to have you here to talk about feminism, Pan Africanism, power, knowledge, history, and all the other themes in your book.
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Mina Salami
Thank you so much, Ayesha. It's really a pleasure to be here.
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Aisha Osori
Great. So we'll just start off with the very simple basic question, what's the background to this book?
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Mina Salami
Maybe the first one that I want to share is when we think about African feminism, or when people hear this phrase, there is a tendency to presume that African feminism is going to provide some kind of report. So a report on the status of African women, which is then assumed to be a dire status. There's an expectation of a lot of empirical facts and statistics about how African women are oppressed, facing poverty, famine, conflict, things like that. And I wrote this book to vehemently counter that assumption that this is what African feminism is solely about, if it even is about. That all of these issues are very grave ones, and they do exist in the African continent and in the diaspora, and they impact African women tremendously. And African feminism does care about these issues, but as a movement and a political philosophy, it encompasses so much more than that. Actually, what I wanted to do was specifically to delve into the political philosophy of African feminism and to think about what it says about the continent, the women in the continent, but also the world at large. So this was really a kind of a key motivation for me in writing this book, or at least one of many. But I can unpack the others as we go.
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Aisha Osori
Thank you. I have to continue on with the title, Can Feminism Be African? Because you say it's a paradox that you use to bring into focus intersections of African and female identity and also to explore what it means to be African in the first place. Can you say more about this?
- [04:36]
Mina Salami
I set about on a journey where I am unpacking the title. In a way, there's something slightly mystical about the naming of a book or a piece for me. Whereas I think most writers will have the content and the outline, the title of the book came to me. The subtitle, which is a most paradoxical question, didn't. However, I started to write the book and unpack the title, Can Feminism Be African? I realized that I really was grappling with paradox. Then I realized concurrently that actually all my work on African feminism, if not all my own existence as an African feminist, is so much shaped by paradox and by the kind of space of contradiction and tension and things not neatly aligning together. I started to really engage with why that is and how paradoxes shape the space of feminism at large. I discovered that actually, throughout feminist history, if you think of some of the most famous feminist statements that really have shaped the movement, they are paradoxical statements. So some examples, there's the feminist poet Audre Lorde's statement, the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. What tools then you've had. She's engaging there with paradox. Simone de Beauvoir's very famous statement that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman is also very paradoxical. Like, what is she saying exactly? What do you mean, we're not born a woman? It helped people to start rethinking gender women, often attributed as actually the impetus for gender studies, in a sense. And then there's many more. But the one that is most Similar to my title question, can feminism be African? Is by the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who was a previously enslaved woman in antebellum America and then became a feminist activist. And she posed the question, which she titled a speech of hers, Ain't I a Woman? And then she gives all these examples of things that are considered to be attributes of womanhood, but that are not attributed to her because of her race. Now we, at least those of us who are engaging with feminist black radical history and so on, we just hear the question and sort of take it as a for granted one. But if we were to go back in time and hear that question, it's deeply paradoxical. How can a woman be asking ain't I a woman? So can feminism be African? Is the question that is meant to jolt us out of our day to day assumptions and presumptions about African women, about Africa, about feminism, and really cause us to pause and think, what is this question trying to do?
- [07:27]
Aisha Osori
I agree with you. I have to say, even though I've read the book, I'm still grappling with the title. It's definitely provocative. How would you define feminism that is African? Or is it the same as saying African feminism? At least two different things.
- [07:42]
Mina Salami
I think that's why it's such a rich question and why I thoroughly was transformed by writing this book. I was about to say that I thoroughly enjoyed writing this book, which I did. Some of my most joy filled days ever were writing this book. But I paused in saying that because I also really struggled writing this book. There were days where I just could almost not bring myself to it because it felt so much like a wound, like I was addressing so many wounds in a sense, to speak to your question, it was because there are no clear cut, simple answers. And again, this goes back to what I was saying about African feminism not being a report card. This title question really forced me into the space of having to first unpack what do we mean by the word Africa? And then what actually are we referring to with the word feminism and also the word be in the title question, what does it mean to be in the context of Africa? And that's how I ended up sectioning the books into three sections, Africa, Feminism and being. Because I realized that in order to answer the question in the way that I can do it with my background was to really deconstruct these three notions in and of themselves.
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Aisha Osori
You note in the book that biologically, what is referred to as whiteness arose approximately 8,000 years ago in human population that settled in Europe basically to enhance vitamin D synthesis in conditions with little sunlight. So the ancestors who migrated to Europe's cold climate adapted by developing pale skin. And I found that fascinating. I don't think I'd read that anywhere. But I was curious. Is there a similar timeline where we can trace the origins of patriarchy as an ideology, or has it always just been.
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Mina Salami
There is a similar, albeit much longer, timeline to which we can trace patriarchy as feminist historians have done a lot of research into this. To put it simply, it would be with the beginning of the agricultural revolution. Before that, hunter gatherers didn't have the kind of governance systems that we might even classify as egalitarian. But it would be in that direction. The agricultural revolution. Humanity started to become precious about land ownership, because which land is my where I'm farming, what belongs to whom? Then there was an importance placed on physical strength. And so it became that men were the ones who would start to possess land. Thereafter they began erroneously and very destructively to also then want to possess women and. And children and everything. Iraqi is a very old system.
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Aisha Osori
Now it makes perfect sense what you've described about it being triggered by the agricultural revolution. When you talk about land and possession. And of course from there you start talking about borders and where does one person's land end and where does another person start? You say nationalism and patriarchy go together. And this explanation you gave definitely brings that in. If you think about this, that statement in your book, nationalism and patriarchy go together just in the context of what's happening in Gaza with the Palestinians, the different wars, Sudan and South Sudan, the internal wars in Ethiopia, just all about borders and nationalism and just what that does. I'm curious. Most of the world lives within these nation states where these borders have been formed with or without our participation. So whether it's through wars in Europe, whether it's through imperialism and the Berlin Conference and craft of Africa, the question I want to ask is, can we remain within these nation states and still create a more equitable world where ideas and beliefs of human security are done for good? I'm really curious. What do you think?
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Mina Salami
I think the question is, do we have a choice? There is of course, a broad and robust discourse on abolishing nations. I think that that's an absolutely interesting proposal and possibly the one that humanity will eventually have to resort to in order to stop genocides. This is happening in Gaza, but probably in our lifetime, at least for the very near future, we are going to be bound by living in nation states. If anything, if we look at our political global order right now. With the rise of populists, governments that are very isolationist, the nation state is becoming just more strong with every day. So the question then really becomes, if we do not have a choice in the present moment, which I think is the case, then as feminists, what do we do?
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Aisha Osori
What can we do?
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Mina Salami
One of the things that we can do, or that I feel that I can do in my capacity, with my expertise and background and imagination, is to create new language. So language is something that I have a deep preoccupation and love affair with. The epigram for the book says for those who believe in the power of language and ideas to transform society, and for those who know that language and ideas are just a ripple in an even bigger sea of transformation. Now, I paraphrase my own epigraph, the last part is something slightly different. But all to say that I want to acknowledge that language is not absolute. In a sense, I think it's the most powerful tool that humans have in terms of shifting our desires, our internal understandings of ourselves, in order to shift also our external reality. So language is something that I want or hope that this book inspires more feminists to engage with. If we think, for example, of a word like sexism was invented in the 1960s or 70s, and it's not that women didn't experience sexism prior to that age, obviously it did to a greater measure than ever, but the tremendous aid of having that word in order to create new legislation, in order to describe experiences that we have as women and how harmful they are. What I was motivated to do in the book is to create a new lexicon of sorts with which we can counter the nation state, oppressive laws or narratives, whatever it might be. But to have those words or the beginnings for a lexicon with which we can then understand and address those things.
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Aisha Osori
I still want to believe it. But you're right that it's very unlikely that in our lifetime we will see the abolition of nation state, and that it does seem like we're in the era of digging in. But some might see that this is the thrashing of a dying monster, so to speak. I read recently about Leopold Sengho and Emy Cesare's commitment to ending colonialism and fashioning a new type of self determination without state sovereignty. The argument was that the wave of decolonizing protest and advocacy was not actually going to favor Africa. And they were saying that what we needed to do was decolonize France, in effect basically acknowledging that the nation states were not Going to work in the way that we were assuming they would. And they were so right. You talk about the imposition of teacher student duality as an accomplished decolonization in African. I mean, for me, thinking about Sengo and Cezare talking about this and advocating for it and never even knowing about that, and constantly questioning my education, why was I taught what I was taught? Why was I not taught X or Y or Z? So I want you to say a bit more about that because you sort of imply that when the teacher student, well, is in the correspondent student archetype, the S is not the critically thinking, interested and curious student. I'm quoting you. But rather the innocent, naive, persistently inferior student. I mean, that hit me. I was just like. I do think of myself as curious, critically minded, but I definitely was innocent and naive and accepted a lot of the things that I was taught without necessarily questioning some of them. Until now.
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Mina Salami
Well, yes. I just first want to say that with regards to nation states or any of these shibboleths that we think cannot change, anything can happen. We all went through a pandemic, for instance, that radically transformed society and how we live our daily lives, and maybe something would happen that would force the nation state to crumble, and it might be a for better or for worse kind of scenario. In that case, who knows? But with regard to the teacher and student and what you say about St. Gore and Cecere, first of all, their work was so beautiful in how they were trying to conjure something very radically different to the reality that they knew. And in that sense, I would very humbly position my book in that kind of genre of African writing that is trying to radically transform Africa through language, as both Dengor and Cesaire were really also passionate about the power of language. Your comment about having this moment of kind of insight that, oh, have I not been thinking critically enough? I think we all have those moments so often, no matter how well read we are. I think it's great that both of us, as public intellectuals and writers, can admit to that, because no doubt people in other professions also feel that this is, of course, no surprise because we have been educated under a very dominant conventional prism that I tend to refer to as Euro patriarchal, which has shaped our knowledge and particularly those of us who were educated in previously colonized countries. This is why I say it was partly difficult to write this book because I was revisiting all of that and thinking how difficult it is. What a challenge to have to, like, undo all of that, because probably we also all felt at some point while receiving that education that we also saw our society around us and there's a mismatch. So again, you know, speaking of paradoxes and tensions, that we embody those things. And so I think that that's truly normal. But why this is so important in my book, and generally speaking, is because ultimately what I'm striving for and what I want to impart is a kind of stepping toward freedom for women and African women specifically in this context. And freedom, in my view, is deeply associated with autonomy and independence. Not in a kind of neoliberal, individualist sense, although even there, there might be some seeds for the kind of freedom that I'm referring to. But it really implies a deep kind of autonomy and the way in which we live in this dualist society. And we think of teachers and students in the colonial way of the teacher as this highly authoritative figure. And yes, the student indeed is this, like, naive archetype that does not get us to the kind of feminist freedom that I'm after. And so there's really a need to deconstruct the whole idea of education, I think, so urgently, especially in Africa, countries are having populations that on a mass scale are failing secondary school exams and things like that, because there's such a disconnect between education as it is received and as it is intended.
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Aisha Osori
Just sticking to the education theme. I think you're absolutely right. And I've had cause over the last couple of years to keep saying, why were our governments, post colonial, 70s, 80s, 90s, still keeping these curriculums? Why didn't they invest in decolonizing the curriculum, teaching us our history? Why am I only learning about the CIA's role in the murder of Lumumba and just what happened in Togo, what happened in guinea, what the French role was or is in West Africa, you know, speaking to education, what are you seeing about your work? Are your books in schools? Who is the primary audience of your book?
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Mina Salami
I know, for instance, that, you know, Obafemi Awolowo was huge on education around the independence era and was adamant on a free education for all. He was, of course, coming from this teacher student perspective to an extent, because he was so influenced by socialism and so on. I too would love to learn more about why the kind of indigenous attitudes toward education were so dismissed from the Yoruba perspective. For instance, that I don't speak Yoruba, but there's a saying that goes something along the lines of the role of the teacher is not taken, it is given. So it's almost like how we talk about power. And I think that that's so amazing. It really speaks to the culture of griots and elders. I believe that it is truly how that society was once structured. And that was completely ignored and still is, because indeed, for the book's research, I looked at dozens, if not hundreds of schools across Africa, just went onto their websites, primary and secondary schools. Of course, the information was not always available, but wherever it was, I would look at what are they structuring the classes around or just like the school slogan and things like that. And Aisha, it really was so depressing because it was so identical to the colonial education I'd received, except that it now has these sprinkles of like a Pan Africanist flair, like, send your children to Britain so that they can come back with African pride. It's tragic, but this is why indeed my books are available in some schools. It will now be published in Mozambique and Angola, so translated into Portuguese. Sensuous Knowledge was translated into several languages. And more importantly, perhaps I've also co authored children's book and I've also worked with government on shaping school curricula. And that was the thing that I found really generative and hope to do more of because I think that's where it starts. It's like, what are children reading? Yeah, what are they reading?
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Aisha Osori
What are they learning? And so please turn your focus to Nigeria. I saw that you dedicated an entire Chapter, Chapter 9, to Andrew Africanism. And within that chapter you were talking about the origins of Pan Africanism. Some really interesting, spicy stories about how the oau, now the au, was hosted in Ethiopia. Everybody should read that part. And you talk about how Africanness has been interwoven with being male. I was curious. How does this theory, observation about Africanness being male sit with the fact that we have had matrilinean communities in Africa for centuries? While Pan Africanism as an ideology is relatively young, only entering into consciousness in 1919 with the first Pan African Conference. So how do you marry these two?
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Mina Salami
This is one of the central questions of that chapter. Despite the history of matrilineality in the African continent, the continent nevertheless has always been and remains deeply patriarchal. So much so that, as I argue, even the very notion of Africanness is conflated with maleness. So Africa is defined from the threshold of masculinity. And I don't want to dismiss or belittle the fact of matrilineality in the continent, but I think sometimes we assume that because we had that, that there were some kind of Matriarchal powers, which is not the case. Even when we look at some of the matrilineal structures, they are still operating within a patriarchal structure where there is a king and the king is the almighty figure. This patriarchal culture within Africa is so deeply entrenched. Since writing this book, I've started to think about the word patriarchy and how relevant it is for our contemporary moment. Because patriarchy is of course, describing rule of the fathers. When we look at it globally and particularly in the west, it's not the rule of the fathers. We just have male dominance. The fathers are God knows where and certainly the fatherly spirit, which, as dominant as it can be, but it still has this caring element to an extent that is completely gone in hyper capitalist patriarchy. But in Africa, the term patriarchy is actually still absolutely relevant and accurate. Even when we look at any domain of leadership, whether it is political, traditional, cultural, we see a lot of fathers, the father figure, the passing of power between father, son and so on.
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Aisha Osori
We call that president's father of the nation. I mean, when Buhari was called Baba by people in the north, you know, Baba is the house of word for father.
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Mina Salami
That really says it all. And so just that distinction, I think, really shows us how deeply entrenched patriarchy is in Africa in a way that is not just an import from the west, as is often said, that the matriarchal cultures were eroded by Western influence. But then we would also have shifted more toward a kind of capitalist male domination, as the west has done, and continued on that path. Instead, we really do see the patriarchal evolution.
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Aisha Osori
That's just fascinating.
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Mina Salami
Picking up on your.
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Aisha Osori
And I know I'm bringing in something else you wrote, but porn your populist, anti Western nativism. And I mean, in that piece you used Chaore of Burkina Faso as an example of that populism. I'm curious in the context of what we're talking about. Nation, state power, women's place. If Traore, for example, his catalog of abuses is well documented, but he remains very popular. But if he wakes up one morning and decides to make half of his cabinet women, for example, will he be a champion for feminism or a champion for gender equality? And how would you assess such a situation?
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Mina Salami
Absolutely not. I think he would be a champion for showing how women can also participate in patriarchal cultures. What would be more significant were if he were to wake up one morning and change his approach from moving away from a militarist approach, moving away from homophobia, moving away from state control of all media and arresting independent journalists. If he did that with an all male parliament, that would not be great at all. I don't want to champion that, but that would be more radical, I think, than having a 50% female who are still all propagating that kind of very destructive society.
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Aisha Osori
I struggle constantly with people who call themselves feminists, who think this type of affirmative tokenism by patriarchal leaders equates to some sort of success. You know, they literally just want to be part of what's going on. How is it that today, in today's world and everything that we know, people are still thinking this way?
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Mina Salami
It's part of a backlash against feminism in Africa. The backlash has many faces, but one of them is the complete takeover of the feminist space by gad, which stands for gender and development and which is very deeply tied to the development sector, to neoliberal global institutions and so on. And gender and development, I have to say, is not the enemy in the sense that, yes, women need economic empowerment, for example, and a lot of positive work has been done in that space and so on and so forth. There are countless examples like that. But this is not feminism. And the conflation of GAD with feminism, which has been so massive, means that when people now think and hear about African feminism, they think about gad, which is why, as I said in the beginning, they assume that you're going to provide some kind of report. This is not to say that there isn't, nevertheless, still an African feminist movement that is explicitly that there is, and it is a very exciting dynamic. And despite its relatively small size, given the continent size, it is doing some really important work. But this kind of conflation is very much part of the backlash. And we see this in across the world also, if we think of place like in France, Macron does have this kind of championing of women's rights. If I may now look internally within African spaces, there would be a kind of criticism of the neoliberal nature of this French feminism. And yet quite often those same people will celebrate the GAD impact in Africa. They are threatened by. By a thought of the actual radical feminist movement.
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Aisha Osori
You talked earlier about the things that feminism could do, and you gave us one example, and I just wanted to find out if you have more. So you gave us the form new languages to counter some of the harmful narratives and ideology. Are there other things that feminists can be doing, or African feminists in particular?
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Mina Salami
They're all sort of connected to each other. I think the overall frame or framework that I would propose that we do urgently is to grapple with the political philosophy of African feminism. Sometimes that's going to mean taking out to the streets in protest. Other times it means grappling with language. So there's many different manifestations of what that might look like, but what it really is, a deep and enlivened engagement with the ideas and the transformations that are proposed by African feminism. Like taking African feminism seriously. Maybe one other sort of sub proposal from that framework would then be to encourage a sense of clarity about our movement. Yet another reason that I wanted to write this book was because I changed my mind about the initiation of African feminism. So, like very many African feminists for a long time, I was under the belief that feminism had always existed in Africa. It existed before western feminism and all of that. I realized that it isn't true. Proto feminism has existed in Africa, like in all continents. But for some reason, in African context, we conflated that again with the actual feminism.
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Aisha Osori
You explained, proto feminism. I know you talk about it in the book, but what does that mean?
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Mina Salami
Proto feminism is when individual women, or women, as in a collective, challenged male dominance and patriarchy Prior to the invention of the feminist movement. So the feminist movement is officially sparked in the early 20th century. And of course, before then, there are many examples of women challenging patriarchy. Hundreds, thousands. Like so many. But the word feminism did not exist. When we think about people like Queen Nzinga of Angola or Yashantewa in. In modern Ghana, these huge warrior like women who lived in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, they, of course, were proto feminists rather than feminists, because the feminist movement did not exist. But within the movement and beyond, we use these women, these kinds of women, as examples of saying that feminism has always existed in Africa. We are being so challenged by the backlash, which is saying, that is un African, and spreading that message out into the masses very successfully. And so, as feminists, to counter the backlash, we began to say, that's not true. It is. Look, we have history, we have receipts. Actually, what that does is obfuscate. One of my proposals is to really speak with clarity about the African feminist movement. It does not mean that we cannot be empowered by those stories. In fact, we should. History is very important. But to have clarity that actually the African feminist movement starts in the 1970s. From there, it changes everything. At least it did for me, because it gives you so much strength with which to counter the backlash, which is something we sadly need to focus a lot of our energies on.
- [33:05]
Aisha Osori
Same, I would say the same for me. Thank you. So much. I want to give you the final word. Is there anything you feel like we haven't touched on about the book that you would want listeners to know about?
- [33:16]
Mina Salami
Aisha, just thank you for your wonderful questions. I've really enjoyed this conversation so much, and I hope that what we've covered provides inspiration for people to pick up the book. Maybe I'll just say that the book is a kind of ambitious. It's quite sweeping. There's a lot. So I just want to say that even though we've covered so much, there is still so much more and so.
- [33:39]
Aisha Osori
Much more that we haven't touched upon. Thank you so much, Mina. It's been a pleasure speaking with you today on the Open Society ideas on the New Book Network. Thank you. Have a good day.