The Sheer Delight of Being a Feminist

In this TEDxJohannesburgWomen talk, South African scholar Pumla Gqola returns to the first time she called herself a feminist, at fifteen. A friend had used the word for women at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. Her point of entry is not an abstract definition: it is the possibility a young person sees when women act against an unjust order. TED’s description connects this memory to the metaphorical cages society builds for girls, while keeping the account grounded in a specific South African political history.

Gqola questions a familiar story about feminism’s timeline. As feminism is described as fashionable, beautiful, or even “safe,” ongoing patriarchal resistance can disappear from view, and political work can be narrated only as difficulty and pain. She does not deny conflict. Instead, she insists that African feminists’ troublemaking, experiments, and solidarities are also sources of delight. That joy is not positive thinking laid over violence, nor a demand that activists stay cheerful. It comes from recognizing that resistance is not an isolated individual act: it draws on earlier work, relationships among peers, and the capacity to imagine a different world together.

Putting joy back into political analysis changes how movement strength is measured. A story told only through oppression can make movement history appear to be an unbroken sequence of losses; a story told only through victories can conceal how patriarchy continues to operate. Gqola holds both realities at once. Danger and constraint remain, while creating language, building solidarity, and refusing assigned roles can still make life more possible. The talk’s brief form cannot represent the full regional, class, generational, or sexual diversity of African feminist movements, and it is not a comprehensive movement history. It is better understood as a first-person entry point explicitly grounded in South African experience.

Read it alongside The Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists to consider how the joy described in personal testimony relates to movement principles, accountability, and shared practice. From Nairobi to Now offers a different movement-history perspective. TED provides the talk and its editorial description; the TEDxJohannesburg archive records it as part of the Bold+Brilliant event.