The unfinished business of women’s struggle for freedom, justice

ON AUGUST 9, 1956, the Women of South Africa rose with a clarity of purpose that still reverberates through the sinews of the Republic. More than 20,000 of them converged upon the seat of State power, the Union Buildings, in a Moment of Defiance that defied geography, race, and class. They were not mere protestors; they were political architects, moral insurgents, and custodians of a vision far ahead of its time.

- ZAMIKHAYA MASETI

At the forefront of that march stood the unyielding spirits of Lilian Ngoyi, Charlotte Maxeke, and Sophie de Bruyn, matriarchs of the resistance whose names must never be invoked lightly. They mobilised not for inclusion into an oppressive order, but to dismantle it altogether. They marched for universal suffrage, for dignity, for spatial and economic justice, and for a democratic future where womanhood would no longer be a category of burden.

As they advanced toward Pretoria, they did so in song, belting out the anthem that remains etched in the bloodstream of every freedom-loving South African: “Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo”-"You strike a woman, you strike a rock”.

This was not a metaphor. It was a manifesto. It was a declaration of war on patriarchy, on pass laws, and on every system that imagined women as marginal to history.

Sixty-nine years later, the nation stands on the cusp of a National Dialogue, an intergenerational reckoning with itself, with its promises, and with the idea of justice that animated 1994. In this moment of political recalibration, it is only right that we pause to ask, with clarity and without sentimentality: how far have we come in actualising the feminist imagination of 1956, and how much further must we go to vindicate it?

To be sure, there are victories to honour. The South African state has, since the advent of democracy, erected one of the most progressive legislative frameworks for gender equity on the continent. Women now constitute approximately 45 per cent of the National Assembly, a figure that places us within the top 20 globally. The leadership of Parliament itself is now held by women, Speaker Thoko Didiza and Deputy Speaker Annelie Lotriet, a symbolic and substantive milestone.