Inside the “Peace Tent”

How women at the 1985 Nairobi conference created a place to “reknit the tissue of life without violence”

A workshop group gathers inside the Peace Tent in Nairobi, 1985. (via Anne S. Walker)

We’ve made a lot of demands on the word “peace” over the years. Even though its meaning —conflict resolution without war—seems simple enough, our complexity as human beings has put that goal to the test over and over again. 

Yet miraculously, we keep trying. And women often find innovative ways of doing so. This was certainly the case in 1985, when on the University of Nairobi campus a group of feminists from around the world pitched what would become known as The Peace Tent. The occasion was the NGO Forum ’85, the civil society assembly of women that took place alongside the United Nations Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya—the UN conference capping off the UN Decade of Women which had begun in Mexico City ten years prior. 

The idea for the Peace Tent was first hatched the year before, when feminists from Africa, Latin America, the United States, and Western Europe gathered in Geneva to form Feminists International for Peace and Food, a cohort which later spearheaded the tent idea. In a statement issued at the time, key organizers Frances T. “Sissy” Farenthold—who in 1972 had become the first woman considered in a bid for Vice President of the United States—and Genevieve Vaughan, also American, said that the Peace Tent stood as “the international feminist alternative to men’s conflict and war,” where “women can substitute women’s truths for patriarchal lies through dialogue, films, and exhibits; women’s joy for patriarchal pessimism through song, dance, and art.”

A large sculpture outside the Peace Tent in Nairobi, 1985. (via Anne S. Walker)

In fact, the Peace Tent was comprised of three tents, all with blue-and-white awnings (UN colors!), at a central spot on the University of Nairobi campus—one large one, where over twenty separate spaces were sectioned off for rotating exhibits; and two smaller ones for informal dialogue sessions, demonstrations, and film presentations. While there was some structure, including a daily morning ritual of reading the Feminists International for Peace and Food statement in its entirety, along with organized programs addressing global politics, the Peace Tent vibe was fairly open and flexible. According to Farenthold, despite disagreements, the “impromptu response to the needs and wishes of the women at the conference was one of the Peace Tent’s greatest strengths.”  

Women meet for a workshop on technology and tools inside the Peace Tent in Nairobi, 1985. (via Anne S. Walker)

It was also a place where political differences could be respectfully discussed, as Caribbean feminist and scholar Peggy Antrobus has said: “There, women from Palestine and Israel, Iran and Iraq, America and the Soviet Union, met for dialogues that did not necessarily lead to agreement but to a deeper understanding of the divisions between them.” Women who entered the tent took the words on a sign outside the tent to heart: “Respect for another’s experience and views, openness and a spirit of cooperation, finding common ground for action in a diversity of opinions.”

Women from the Media Women in Africa Features provide a silk screen printing demonstration inside the Peace Tent in Nairobi, 1985. (via Anne S. Walker)

The physical Peace Tent closed when the Nairobi gathering concluded. (It was later included in a documentary by German filmmaker Inge Langen called Facing Tomorrow, which premiered at the Munich Film Festival in 1988.) But “its heritage, however, is clear,” wrote scholar Karen Maters in a dissertation paper for the Commission of the European Communities: “the obvious wish of those present to find common ground and to understand one another… with the fundamental aim, through the contacts made and maintained, experiences lived and shared, to reknit a tissue of life without violence, discrimination and oppression for all women in the world in a renewed spirit of solidarity.”    

Oh, but for a Peace Tent today!