#3 DECEMBER 2016 Bubble-gum feminism and the decolonialisation and decapitalisation of minds Fungai Machirori About ten years ago, while pursuing my undergraduate degree in journalism and media studies in Zimbabwe, our class took a compulsory course on gender and feminism. For most of the semester, we went through the works of feminist scholars and activists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem. We learnt about the different waves of feminism within a context of a history very removed from our own, but which our studies universalized. And as a result – at least in my own mind – feminism had nothing to do with me beyond helping me pass a course to get closer to completion of my studies. I carried on this way for the greater part of my early to mid-20s, working in civil society and identifying myself as a‘gender activist’, conforming many of my emotions to agreed standards of what I’d like to think of as polite anger. It would be some years later, during a fellowship in feminist studies, that I would come to the deep realization that I still didn’t know what feminism really was. For a long time, I had been resistant to what I then considered external‘labelling’, with the following words from a 1994 interview with Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta resonating deeply with me; among other responses to the question of whether she considers herself a feminist, Emecheta states:“I have never called myself a feminist. Now if you choose to call me a feminist, that is your business…” (Mikell G.(2003): African Feminism) I also mused over other works such as the poem ‘Sisterhood’ by Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu, which narrates the conversation between a black maid and her white ‘madam’ – supposedly united in solidarity against patriarchy – which ends as follows: “I’ll looked up from my chore on the kitchen floor where, new found sister had ordered me to be on knees to scrub the floor clean for the pittance she paid: on knees to scrub the floor clean for sisterarchy.” 1