Gail Smith
(Moderator), Feminist Author & Journalist
Gail Smith is a feminist writer, journalist and media strategist, and is the ReaBua:HerStory Campaign Project Manager. Gail’s publications include both journalism and long-form essays on race, gender, feminism, and culture, and she has written extensively on Winnie Mandela. Gail’s TV credits include It’s A Feminist Thing 2020, South Africa’s first unapologetically feminist talk-show, as well as research and writing on The Life and Times of Sarah Baartmann (1998) and The Return of Sarah Baartmann (2002) – for which she documented the historic return of Sarah Baartmann, pejoratively exhibited and described as ‘The Hottentot Venus’ – from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 2002. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2006, Gail is also the former Spokesperson of the South African Human Rights Commission, a former Senior Specialist Writer City Press, and the former head of the UNISA Institute for Gender Studies