If you have managed to survive the well-intentioned but tone-deaf annual inanities of a “pink-washed” Women’s Day this week — from the workplace roses to the cheerful WhatsApp memes of Beyoncé singing “Who run the world? Girls!” — I hope you have also taken the time to reflect on the true and enduring significance of South Africa’s National Women’s Day. We have a duty to remember and pay tribute to the women of 1956 as the defiant leaders, powerful intellects and disrupters who laid the foundation for the many freedoms we enjoy today.
Some 68 years ago, 20,000 women from every corner of South Africa descended on the Union Buildings in a powerful, non-violent protest against the apartheid government’s proposed amendments to the Native (Urban Areas) Act, colloquially known as “the pass laws”. These required black South Africans to carry a “passbook” at all times when in “white areas”. The passbook — an “internal passport” that stripped all people designated black in terms of the Population Registration Act of their South African citizenship, rendering them foreigners in their own country — monitored and restricted the movements of the majority of citizens. It also upheld segregation and allowed for the easy management of cheap black labour.
Along with job reservation and restricted educational opportunities, the pass laws controlled the freedom of movement of the majority of the country’s citizens, allowing one sector of society to build up its wealth while preventing others from acquiring it. The government of then prime minister JG Strijdom wanted to extend the pass laws to black women, thereby fortifying one of the pillars holding up the entire edifice of apartheid. They had to be stopped.
The march was spearheaded by a diverse and formidable coalition of women: Lilian Ngoyi, “the mother of black resistance” and the first woman elected to the ANC’s executive committee; Rahima Moosa, a member of the Transvaal Indian Congress who marched while pregnant with her daughter, Natasha; Helen Joseph, who co-founded the Federation of South African Women and survived multiple assassination attempts at the hands of the government; and Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, a textile worker and trade unionist who co-led the march at the tender age of 18. Years later, when the apartheid regime fell, only Williams-de Bruyn was alive to see the advent of democracy in South Africa.
The specificity of the legislative and institutional oppression against which these brilliant women were protesting gets lost in the annual chorus of platitudes about women’s strength and beauty
Singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika as they marched, and drawing strength from their distinct experiences and communities, they represented a powerful, united movement that challenged the continued segregation and subjugation of women in South Africa. With many carrying babies on their backs, the women sang protest songs outside the seat of JG Strijdom’s government before standing together in silence for a full 30 minutes.
In November 2022, the UN’s sixth committee — the international body’s multilateral forum that considers legal questions — resolved to work towards drafting a treaty on crimes against humanity. Defined as state- or military-sanctioned acts of “murder, rape, torture, apartheid, deportations, persecution, and other offences committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population based on a government or organisational policy”, the draft treaty is an effort to hold member states accountable for widespread or systematic acts of violence and terror perpetrated against specific populations.
While the UN has to prevent and address the crimes of genocide, torture, apartheid and forced disappearances, it has yet to ratify a treaty specific to crimes against humanity. Since the adoption of the resolution on this treaty, a group of international gender activists — including former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai and Gloria Steinem — have been lobbying for the crime of “gender apartheid” to be included in this treaty.
Galvanised by the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan under the repressive Taliban regime, the campaign to criminalise gender apartheid aims to outlaw forms of governance designed to “systematically oppress and dominate another gender group or groups, so that the dominant group may live alongside them and benefit from their subjugation”.
The South African Women’s March of 1956 is often misinterpreted as a march against gender discrimination. The specificity of the legislative and institutional oppression against which these brilliant women were protesting gets lost in the annual chorus of platitudes about women’s strength and beauty. But the women of 1956 understood deeply how greed and oppression came together to fuel the apartheid project: it was a state-sponsored effort to oppress and dominate another population group, so that the dominant group could benefit from their subjugation while living alongside them.
The baton of these women’s visionary leadership has now been passed to today’s gender- apartheid campaigners. In the spirit of Lillian Ngoyi, Rahima Moosa, Helen Joseph and Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, we must remain vigilant in our commitment to reforming and outlawing systems and institutions that perpetuate patriarchal oppression in South Africa and around the world.
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