The Mawina Kouyate Daughters of Africa Award was created to honor the memory and achievements of Mighty Daughter of Africa, Mawina Kouyate. Sister Mawina was a founding member of the All-African Women's Revolutionary Union (A-AWRU) and made an excellent contribution to the overall development, consolidation and expansion of the A-APRP. She dedicated 29 years of her life to building the A-APRP and A-AWRU and crossed into the ancestral realm in September 2002.
The MKDOAA is awarded each year to an individual and/or organisation that has activity worked for the struggle for the advancement of women's revolutionary advancement and the advancement of humanity. Some previous recipients of the award are Wangari Maathai, Assata Shakur, Berta Càceres, Madame Hadja Andrèe Toure, Mama Charlotte O'Neal, Piedada Esneda Córdoba Ruiz, Rasmea Odeh and others.
Fatima Bernawi
Afro-Palestinian militant Fatima Bernawi, is the first Palestinian woman to carry out an act of armed resistance against the zionist entity, she then gladly took the honor of being the female Palestinian political prisoner. The reverence she commands in Palestine is a symbol of the revolutionary connection between the liberation of Africa and Palestine. Fatima also represents the true capabilities and resilience of the militant African woman. Fatima joined the ancestors in the fall of 2022, but her legacy lives on in the resistance.
Born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a Nigerian father and a Palestinian mother, Bernawi suffered as a child under forced displacement of the Nakba and together with her mother had to move to a refugee camp. At the young age of 9 she smuggled herself into Jerusalem to reunite with her father. In 1960 they lived in the African community of Jerusalem. Her father had been an active participant of the revolutionary movement and in defense of Palestine during the Nakba, and the young Fatima became an early member of the newly formed Fateh movement.
Fatima Bernawi worked as a nurse in Qalqilya during the 1967 occupation and saw firsthand the impacts of the Zionist onslaught on the West Bank of Palestine. Through those experiences, she was one of the first women to plan an armed operation in Palestine, the attempted suitcase bombing of a cinema screening of a film celebrating the occupation. She was seized by occupation forces and on 19 October 1967 became the first Palestinian woman political prisoner of the contemporary Palestinian revolution.
She was sentenced to 30 years in prison and stayed true to herself and to the commitment of liberating her homeland by all means from the river to the sea. Her sister, Enaam Bernawi, was jailed for one year alongside her. During Fatima Bernawi’s time in the occupation prisons, she was also jailed with fellow Palestinian woman freedom fighter Zakia Shammout, who was pregnant and gave birth in her prison cell with support of the trained nurse Bernawi.
In November 1977 she was released in a prisoner exchange forcing her into exile. During her time in Jordan and Lebanon, she participated in the Palestinian revolution as a member of social organizations. She later returned to Gaza in 1994 and lived with her husband, liberated prisoner Fawzi al-Nimr. Later they moved to Cairo, living there for the last several years before making their transition.
While Bernawi was the first Palestinian woman prisoner of the contemporary (post-1967) Palestinian revolution, she made always sure to remember fellow Palestinian women who had been jailed in the earlier two decades of occupation, including many women detained, held in forced labor camps and subjected to harsh violence by occupation soldiers during the Nakba.
