Reframing Allyship with African Women in Academia: Perspectives from Mozambique

Abstract African women academics navigate intersecting gendered, racialised, institutional and geopolitical hierarchies, yet efforts to support their advancement often focus on mentoring, confidence-building and individual resilience rather than on the redistributing power, resources, opportunities, recognition and decision-making authority. In this commentary, three African women academics at a Mozambican university bring existing scholarship into dialogue with collective reflections on their experiences. We position African women not only as recipients of allyship but also as interpreters of its credibility, actors who exercise power and potential allies within shifting institutional relationships. We argue that allyship should not be understood as an identity that a supportive colleague, supervisor, institution or international partner can simply claim, but rather as an accountable practice assessed by whether it changes who is recognised, who controls resources, who participates in consequential decisions, who bears the risks of dissent and whether harm is addressed and repaired. Our situated reflections suggest that support may become strained as women’s visibility, authority and independence increase. Drawing on existing scholarship, we consider how strategic invisibility, deliberately limiting visible claims to authority while exercising influence indirectly, may preserve access when support is conditional, while concealing contributions and potentially reproducing institutional hierarchies. We offer this relationship as a conceptual proposition rather than an empirically established pattern. We propose recognition, redistribution, representation, risk-sharing and repair as five dimensions for deliberating whether support remains accountable as women gain autonomy and authority, with the perspectives of those receiving support central to that judgement.