The Feminist Bar Podcast

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with Kaata Minah to talk about what donor funding does to feminist organising on the continent. They start with the material reality of what it costs to organise and where the money comes from. They get into how compliance and metrics shape what organisations build, what feminist organisations have to conform to in order to get funded, what “value for money” actually means when applied to political work, and the performance of activism that funding can demand. The conversation closes on how organisations hold on to their politics while depending on donors, and the funding models being built from within communities. Find a platform to listen here : linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast Find the podcast on social media here: x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with Nicole Ditsie to talk about how anxiety, depression, dissociation, and body image actually show up in the erotic life. They get into the gap between wanting to want and actually wanting, and what the nervous system's relationship to safety has to do with pleasure.  The conversation moves into what care looks like between partners when mental health is part of the relationship, and the exploration of diverse practices to keep intimacy exciting. Find a platform to listen here: linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast Follow the podcast on social media here  x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with Flower Akaliza to debrief AFF 2026, held in Windhoek this August under the theme HASEGO, The Womxn Has Arrived. They trace what the Forum actually is and the political project it was built for in 2006. They talk through feminist space and what has evolved over the years, the tensions that emerge as the movement embraces expansiveness in identity, and the complex questions intersectionality keeps raising. The episode moves through feminist love, cross movement building, the protest that impacted this year's Forum, its outcomes, and the inter generational tensions running underneath it, with additional perspectives from other activists who attended. Find a platform to listen here: linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with Zoe Samudzi to talk about food as a political weapon, in Gaza and in Zimbabwe alike. Gaza's perennial crop areas have been destroyed at devastating scale, its agricultural wells razed, its livestock sector collapsed. African countries spend billions each year importing food they were once capable of growing. Zoe and Tinatswe trace the mechanisms behind both, structural adjustment, export agriculture mandates, bombed farmland, blockades, and land dispossession that never fully got undone after independence. Different tools, same question, who controls whether people eat and why. This conversation looks at how that dependency gets built in the first place, and what dismantling it would actually require. Find a platform to listen here: linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast                

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with an anonymous guest to talk about how trauma actually moves through family lines, what the science of epigenetics can support and where it gets overclaimed, and how colonial violence and land dispossession still show up in nervous systems generations later. They spend time on where Western therapy falls short for Black and African women specifically, built on the assumption that healing is individual and language is the primary tool. The conversation opens into questions of identity and where you locate yourself in the world once you understand what you inherited without choosing it. Find a platform to listen here: linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with Rumbidzai Musonza and Sarudzayi Njerere to talk about the tension running through African feminist movements between generations. They get into who holds institutional memory, who controls funding and resources, and how that shapes the relationship between older and younger organisers. The conversation covers the line between mentorship and gatekeeping, what digital organising has changed and what it hasn't, and what succession actually looks like when one generation hands the work to the next. They also make space for what intergenerational love actually offers the movement, real mentorship, and the co-creation possible when generations choose to build alongside each other instead of around each other. Find a platform to listen here : linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast          

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with an anonymous guest to talk about the blurred line between romantic relationships and transactional arrangements. They ask what conditions push access to resources to the centre of intimacy, and what it means that the logic of sex work has moved into mainstream dating without any of the rights, clarity, or protection that would come with actually naming it that. The conversation holds that many women have no real economic alternative, and that the arrangement itself still deserves structural critique. It also asks what people say they want from relationships versus what they actually chase, and where that gap comes from. Find a platform to listen here: linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast Follow the podcast on social media:  x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with healer, medium, and artist Thandiwe Gula Ndebele to talk about African spiritual traditions and their contested, generative place inside feminist movement building today. They start with the historical record, the mediums and spiritual leaders who held explicit roles in anti-colonial resistance and the gendered way colonialism went after those traditions specifically. From there they get into the tension inside African feminist spaces now, where feminists across faiths and practices all organise together, and who gets to lead reclamation when it happens and who gets left out of it. Find a platform to listen here: linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast Socials:  x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with a queer couple to talk about building a marriage in a criminalised context. They get into coming into their own identities, transitioning within the relationship, and what it takes to hold each other through that kind of change. The highs, the lows, the fights, the lessons. This is what a real queer life together looks like, told by two people living it. Find a platform to listen here: linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with Tapiwa Chikungwa, an educator with experience navigating schooling systems across several continents, to talk about what African formal education was built to produce and who it was never built for. They trace the gap between getting girls into classrooms and actually educating them once inside, what happens to girls who clear the access barrier and walk into schools that remain hostile to them, and who benefits from keeping girls undereducated without ever saying so directly. That same system is failing boys differently, leaving many of them pulled toward red pill content and increasingly resistant to female authority, while parents remain largely absent from the fight and teachers burn out inside a structure that was never built to sustain them either. Listen here: linktr.ee/thefeministbarpodcast Follow the podcast on social media:  x.com/thefeministbar instagram.com/thefeministbarpodcast