SA's women still held back by a hidden dompas: male prejudice

Today is the last day of Women's Month 2025. As has become custom over the past 31 years since the dawn of the democratic nonracial dispensation in this country, August is celebrated in honour of the women who confronted apartheid and marched against pass laws in 1956.

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The apartheid project had captured state power in 1948, and by 1956, the process of consolidating its complete grip on power was truly underway. Worse was still to come, but the oppressed masses were still buoyed, perhaps by events that took place a year earlier when the Congress of the People took place at Kliptown, Soweto, to famously adopt the Freedom Charter.

The charter was a document far removed from the racist, fascist designs of apartheid on the majority of the people.

While black men bore the physical brunt of the cruelty of apartheid in their interaction with its functionaries in their daily existence, nay, survival, for that is what apartheid had reduced the lot of the African to, African women became the most oppressed demographic.