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As South Africa marks Women’s Month, we have every reason to celebrate the remarkable gains won by generations of women who fought for constitutional equality, political representation and access to positions of leadership. Those victories transformed our democracy and restored the humanity of women. But they also invite a more difficult question: what lies beyond access?
Recent debates surrounding the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide have exposed important disagreements about institutional design, governance and accountability. These debates matter, particularly following the president’s appointment — with effect from August 1 this year — of the members of the council. Democratic institutions should always be subjected to scrutiny, especially when they are entrusted with responding to one of the gravest human rights crises confronting our nation. Yet critiques of the council should not obscure a deeper challenge.
The struggle today is no longer only for women to enter institutions. It is for institutions to become worthy of the women who lead them
Suppose every criticism of the council is correct, or that parliament amends the National Council on Gender-Based Violence Act, strengthening the council’s powers, improving its governance and providing greater resources. Suppose we build the perfect institution. Will South Africa’s rate of gender-based violence suddenly decline? Will women feel safer in their homes, workplaces, universities and communities? Will survivors finally encounter institutions that believe them, protect them and restore their dignity?
The uncomfortable answer is probably not. That is because the crisis runs much deeper than institutional design.
For decades, South Africa’s women’s movements fought courageously for access. They fought for constitutional equality and for laws recognising women’s rights. They fought for representation in parliament, on the bench, in the executive, in universities, in boardrooms and throughout the public service. These were historic victories. But access alone is not transformation.
Women have entered institutions that remain organised around deeply gendered understandings of authority, leadership and power. We have secured seats at decision-making tables while continuing to navigate cultures that reward domination, silence dissent, excuse misogyny and punish those who challenge entrenched authority.
The recent documentary The Trials of Winnie Mandela is a timely reminder that patriarchy does not disappear simply because a movement speaks the language of liberation. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela remains one of the most complex figures in South African history. Her life’s truth should endlessly trouble anyone who aspired to a liberated South Africa.
She endured extraordinary persecution at the hands of the apartheid state. But she also experienced isolation, suspicion and hostility within the broader liberation movement. Most significant is what her story reveals about the relationship between gender and power: that even movements and institutions dedicated to justice can reproduce patriarchy.
Even organisations committed to liberation can become spaces where women who refuse to conform are labelled irrational, divisive, unstable or dangerous. This should not surprise us. Patriarchy is remarkably adaptive. It survives constitutional reform, institutional reform and democratic transition. It simply finds new ways to organise power.
Too often, we understand patriarchy as men occupying positions of authority. But patriarchy is far more sophisticated than that. It is a system that determines whose voices are trusted, whose anger is considered legitimate, whose leadership is celebrated and whose dissent is punished. Women themselves can become participants in reproducing these systems when institutional conformity is rewarded above transformation.
This explains why some of South Africa’s strongest and most accomplished women continue to experience retaliation, intimidation, reputational attacks, professional exclusion and psychological harm within institutions that publicly celebrate gender equality and human rights.
The violence they encounter is not always physical. It can be institutional. It can be emotional. It is psychological. And it can be spiritual.
It manifests through exclusion from decision-making, the discrediting of expertise, the questioning of competence, and the expectation that women should remain agreeable even while confronting injustice.
If we truly wish to eradicate gender-based violence, we must expand our understanding of violence itself. Violence is not confined to bruises and broken bones. It also exists wherever institutions systematically diminish women’s agency, credibility and dignity.
This is why the next frontier of feminist struggle cannot simply be representation. It must be institutional transformation.
Every public institution should be required to understand gendered power — not through symbolic compliance workshops or annual Women’s Month commemorations, but through sustained education about patriarchy, coercive control, organisational culture, unconscious bias, intersectionality and institutional accountability.
Institutions are shaped by the assumptions of the people who lead them. Changing organisational culture requires changing how those leaders understand power itself. But education alone is insufficient. South Africa must also begin a serious conversation about reparative justice.
Our response to gender-based violence has understandably focused on criminal accountability. Yet survivors often lose far more than legal rights. They lose employment, income, educational opportunities, housing, professional advancement, emotional wellbeing and years of their lives.
Justice should therefore mean more than punishment. It should mean restoration. A truly survivor-centred response must include material reparations that enable women to rebuild lives disrupted by violence and institutional failure. This could include access to education, trauma counselling, livelihood support, economic empowerment initiatives, housing assistance and other measures that recognise the profound social and economic costs of gendered harm.
This is where institutions such as the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide have the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution.
The success of the council should not be measured by the number of meetings convened or strategies drafted. It should be measured by whether it transforms how power operates across South African society; whether it challenges institutions to confront their own cultures; and whether it insists that equality is experienced in practice, not merely proclaimed in policy.
South Africa does not lack laws, institutions or constitutional commitments. What we lack is the collective courage to confront the subtle, everyday ways in which patriarchy continues to shape our institutions, our workplaces, our politics, our movements and even our own understanding of leadership.
The real question, therefore, is not whether any single institution is fit for purpose. It is whether we are prepared to transform the institutions that continue to reproduce gendered power.
If the story of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela teaches us anything, it is that liberation itself is not enough. Institutions that speak the language of justice can still become places where women are diminished, doubted or discarded when they refuse to conform. Democracy does not automatically dismantle patriarchy; it merely gives us the opportunity to do so.
Women’s Month should therefore be more than a celebration of how far we have come. It should also be a time for an honest reckoning with how far we still have to go.
The struggle today is no longer only for women to enter institutions. It is for institutions to become worthy of the women who lead them.
- Ntuli is a commissioner of the South African Human Rights Commission
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