Introduction
Marjorie Mbilinyi, affectionately known as “Dada Marj,” is one of Tanzania’s pioneering feminist thinkers and social justice educators. With decades of work in academia, policy research and grassroots feminist organizing, Marjorie has consistently challenged patriarchy, neoliberalism and inequality in all its forms. Though now retired, she continues to write and reflect, offering guidance to younger generations of activists.

Early Life and Education
Born in New York in 1943, Marjorie was active in the U.S. civil rights movement during the 1960s. As a student at Cornell University, she joined protests demanding racial justice, including campaigns to protect Black Americans’ right to vote in the South. Her activism in that era was shaped by collective struggle, working alongside both men and women, even as she began to question the patriarchal structures within movements themselves.
Her political awakening came from witnessing injustice firsthand. She often says: “Living without change is not possible.” That conviction stayed with her.
Marjorie moved to Tanzania in the 1960s after meeting her future husband, Simon Mbilinyi, a Tanzanian agricultural economist. She became a Tanzanian citizen in 1967, the same year as the Arusha Declaration, a key moment in Tanzania’s post-independence push for socialism and self-reliance. That era shaped her political orientation, reinforcing her belief in radical transformation grounded in people’s struggles.

She began teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam, working in the Faculty of Education and later at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), where she mentored young scholars and activists committed to feminist and anti-colonial thought.