South Africans celebrate Women's Day 2025

South African women celebrate Women's Day 2025

By Pregs Govender

Women’s Day is a time to honour our ancestors’ love for humanity’s freedom, justice, equality, peace and dignity. Love inspired the courage to educate, organise, unite and resist those who stole land, water, abundant natural and mineral resources; those who killed and raped, silencing laughter and joy; those who manipulated culture, relegating thousands to apartheid’s barren Bantustans and ghettoes, home to those too sick or too old to continue serving white homes, factories, mines and farms.

Dora Tamana, founder of the Federation of SA Women, motivated the women’s march in 1956, arguing: “We have seen unemployment, lack of accommodation and families broken because of passes. We have seen it with our men. Who will look after our children when we go to jail for a small technical offence – not having a pass?”

Apartheid normalised the imprisonment, beating and criminalisation of “the dark peoples”, as then prime minister BJ Vorster described people in apartheid Israel and South Africa after being hosted by Israel in 1976.

Today, flash floods and fires characterise climate change that endangers the world and humanity. Fascist forces deny yet exploit these and other real problems, including gender-based violence, corruption and unemployment, to destroy economies and countries – to unleash the “dogs of war”.

SA is punished for its case against Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people at the International Court of Justice. The argument is that, contrary to Israel’s own recorded statements, there is no genocide and this has got nothing to do with us.

If the women of 1956 had accepted that reasoning, women would never have united. Apartheid wanted to extend passes to women it classified as Bantu. The Federation of SA Women organised and united women that apartheid classified as Bantu, coloured, Asian and white.

Lilian Ngoyi, Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, Rahima Moosa, Helen Joseph and 20 000 women embodied Martin Luther King’s internationalism, the idea that “injustice anywhere affects justice everywhere”.

Women’s Day 2025 is the time to thank the insubordinate women of the 1956 women’s march and the generations before and after. The 1976 generation embraced Steve Biko’s call for apartheid’s oppressed to identify as black, not non-white. Many joined armed resistance wings of political movements, the trade union, community and women’s organisations and the United Democratic Front. The Federation of SA Women’s Women’s Charter inspired the Women’s National Coalition’s campaign during SA’s transition to democracy that ensured more than 2 million women influenced the negotiations and the final Constitution.

After the democratic elections in 1994, black women who’d previously entered Parliament as cleaners, cooks and servers, entered as public representatives in large numbers. Women’s voices crafted gender-responsive laws, budgets and institutions. Apartheid’s draft Country Report to the UN Conference in Beijing had excluded African women in apartheid’s homelands, rendering them invisible.

"SA’s final 1994 report recognised and included all the women of SA. The country’s new Constitution, laws, institutions and budgets upheld nonracism, nonsexism, dignity, equality, justice, non-discrimination; and substantive socioeconomic, civil, political and cultural rights. Statistics made crucial care work visible."

From 1994, larger numbers of black people entered untransformed, unwelcoming higher education institutions, yet qualified as scientists, engineers, archaeologists, doctors, architects, digital experts and more.

There are parents, mainly still mothers, who nourish and care alongside farmers, and healthcare and social workers. They are teachers, artists, poets, musicians, writers, film-makers and sportswomen who inspire movements, institutions and individuals across SA.

They work for universal healthcare for everyone’s wellbeing, providing reproductive choice and ensuring no one dies of preventable illness.

They work for food sovereignty and security instead of hunger; employment beyond poverty wages and precarious working conditions; and for comprehensive social security, including basic income and care for children, the elderly and those who live with disabilities. Researchers develop economic alternatives, including the full implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s wealth tax.

There are those who work daily with survivors of gender-based violence and understand how critical it is to transform spatial planning that served capitalist, patriarchal apartheid, trapping millions of black South Africans in poverty.

The absence of secure homes with water and sanitation, safe transport and paved, well-lit roads exposes everyone, especially women and girls, to the threat of criminal, misogynistic violence that needs urgent redress.

There are workers trying to ensure decent wages and working conditions in increasingly precarious jobs. Often, they see beyond the specific areas, rights and issues they work on, to the intersections between their struggles in SA, across Africa and the rest of the world. They connect the dots between gender-based violence and the global misogynistic culture that enables the trillion-dollar arms industry to commit genocide with utter impunity, while using the power of empire to divide and rule.

They see the dictators who destroy women’s rights supported by the US and the UK (which previously banned them as terrorists), and the resource wars beneath the lies of “liberating women”.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu asserted that when the true history of SA is written, Lilian Ngoyi’s name must be written in “letters of gold”, not to deify her, but to understand the lessons of her leadership, including in the Garment Workers’ Union of SA, the Federation of SA Women and the ANC, and as an internationalist who understood the power of solidarity.

Today, in the battle for our minds, hearts, institutions and history, our ancestors, including Tutu, are turned into cuddly teddy bears, the substance of their love white-washed and reduced to fudge.

The Desmond Tutu International Peace Lecture in November 2023 took place 43 days after Israel had murdered 11 500 Palestinian people, most of whom were children and women. Today, that number exceeds 60 000 Palestinian people, not counting the thousands buried under their homes, schools, universities and hospitals by US, UK and German bombs and tanks.

The horror of Israel’s weapons of starvation or of shooting children, like seven-year-old Hind Rajab who, alongside two paramedics, was killed after pleading for help after Israel killed her family.

Palestinian feminist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls this a reproductive genocide aimed at “unchilding Palestinians and the future”.

"On the eve of Melinda Gates’ lecture on the theme of Women’s Voices on 17 November 2023, I’d written to the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, quoting Tutu’s clear call for the freedom of Palestine from apartheid Zionist racism, Israel’s colonial settler occupation and ethnic cleansing."

My letter quoted the voices of Palestinian women’s organisations, including their call for UN protection. It included Jewish and South African feminists like then international relations and cooperation minister Naledi Pandor, who took SA’s genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice, and Judge Navi Pillay, chairperson of the UN Commission of Inquiry into the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel.

The letter ended with a call: “May Melinda Gates use her power to act for a just peace by calling for a ceasefire now, an end to genocide, urgent humanitarian support and non-violent boycott, divestment and sanctions, to peacefully end apartheid, as Tutu did, for Palestine.” Gates did not call for any of this.

In her response to Gates, historian and author Athambile Masola spoke through her grief and anger at Israel’s genocide, honouring Desmond and Leah Tutu’s legacy. She said: ‘Why can’t we tell the truth about how hard it feels … we must have honesty … we can be courageous … it is possible to imagine that once upon a time, Palestine might be free … I do believe there will be a future … there are Palestinian children in the future … Sudanese children … Congolese children … African children…”

The foundation’s CEO and chair’s Women’s Month statement does not mention SA’s International Court of Justice case or demand Israel ends its genocide, nor does it call for the release of Palestinians, including hundreds of Palestinian children who were kidnapped, tortured and raped in Israeli prisons every year, long before October 2023.

In December 2023, a Love and Insubordination Podcast episode, titled Free Palestine and Humanity, added the voice of Queers from Palestine.

My guest, Palestinian feminist Sarah Ihmoud, read Mosab Abu Toha’s poem:

“We love what we have, no matter how little, because if we don’t, everything will be gone. If we don’t, we will no longer exist…

Someday soon…

we will be the trees that will give shade

to children sleeping inside or playing on swings.”

• Govender is an activist and author

• To learn more about Pregs Govender's work visit https://www.pregsgovender.com/

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