Africa: Wathint' Abafazi 70 Years On

The year 2026 marks the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Women's March against extending the dompas to the black women of South Africa. Every August, the commemoration of Women's Month highlights the inheritances and unfinished legacies of women's anti-apartheid resistance. This Women's Month, it is timely to reflect on the legacies of women's activism in South Africa over 70 years and more.

Organised by the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), the 1956 Women's March was a multiracial mass demonstration against pass laws. An estimated 20,000 women descended on Pretoria's Union Buildings, presenting 14,000 petitions to Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom. Established in 1954, FEDSAW's leadership, under luminaries such as Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, and Sophia Williams, was particularly significant.

Previous women's organising had arisen within the increasingly strict racial boundaries of the colonial and apartheid state. In 1913, Charlotte Mannya Maxeke had led the women's anti-pass campaign in Bloemfontein, in the then Orange Free State. This led to the establishment of the Bantu Women's League, which later became the African National Congress(ANC) Women's League in 1948. Similarly, the Black Sash, established in 1955, was an organisation of white women, bringing English-speaking women together with a smaller group of Afrikaans-speaking women. Alongside FEDSAW, these anti-apartheid resistance organisations were represented at the Women's March.

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The freedom song 'Wathint' abafazi, Strijdom!', with the words 'Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo, uzu kufa!' ('You strike a woman, you strike a rock, you will be crushed!'), featured at the 1956 protest. The political slogan 'Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo' would become one of the liberation movement's most enduring phrases, ricocheting across its posters and popular culture over the next four decades.

Yet, the slogan's continued ubiquity into the twenty-first century belies the unevenness with which women's activism has been recorded and remembered. Often invoked in popular memory, women's activism has too often been marginalised against a celebration of men's leadership, armed struggle, and formal political institutions.

A 2025 Special Issue of the South African Historical Journal, edited by Monica G. Fernandes and Ana Stevenson, centres women's fight against apartheid. Spotlighting individuals and organisations, authors explore Ngoyi's urban roots and Williams' formative experiences in the youth movement; uncover lesser known figures such as Vesta Smith and Joyce Piliso-Seroke; consider Jewish social scientists Hilda Kuper and Ellen Hellmann's relationship with scholar-activists of colour Fatima Meer and Regina Gelana Twala; revisit Black internationalism, the Black Sash, and the ANC Women's Section; and critique post-1994 literature about women's experiences in the struggle.

This 70th anniversary also offers a timely opportunity to consider women's continuing activism towards realising the rights guaranteed in the 1996 Constitution, 30 years later. Thanks to the efforts of various women's groups as South Africa democratised, gender rights were enshrined in the final Constitution: in the Bill of Rights, gender is named as one of a slew of identifiers in anti-discriminatory legislation. However, the guarantees of gender equality have not gone unopposed, seen in South Africa most tellingly through the perniciously high rates of men's abuse of women, an enduring and insidious issue, more than 30 years into this democracy.

Legally, according to this Constitution, the status of South African women should be indisputable, protected as they are by gender-specific legislation against discrimination. Paradoxically, however, the ubiquity of men's abuse of women, particularly in the context of intimate partner relationships, shatters any visions of constitutional equality.

Despite multiple Presidential Summits dedicated to gendered violence, the drafting of the National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide in 2020, and the establishment of the Gender-Based Violence and Femicide (GBVF) Response Fund, high rates of gendered violence continue to plague twenty-first century South Africa. This is the legacy of the historical and continuing disregard of women's activism: where men's anti-apartheid activism is celebrated and women's is consigned to the margins.

The pattern of centring men's reactions is one that persists in this young democracy, despite the 1996 Constitution having been praised worldwide for its attention to gender. Beginning in 2016, women's social media activism against gendered violence through #MenAreTrash became centred on men's responses, rather than women's vulnerability and frustration at the high levels of gendered violence that plague twenty-first century South Africa. Following successful lobbying by women's groups, the year 2025 saw gender-based violence and femicide declared a 'national disaster' by current President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Despite the praises heaped on the 1996 Constitution, and following the 'national disaster' status of men's abuse of women in contemporary South Africa, it is clear that there is still much to be done in order to realise the rights to gender equality guaranteed in this Constitution. Thus, the special issue brings together established and emerging historians and scholars working on feminist and women's history in South Africa, not only to trace the marginalisation of women's activism in South Africa's past, but to delineate the deleterious effects of this marginalisation on South Africa's present.

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Judging by Ramaphosa's own admission that the 'scourge' of gendered violence demands 'exceptional measures' to combat, the project of centring women's historical and continuing activism against a range of oppressions, whether it be apartheid historically or men's abuse of women in the contemporary period, cannot be more urgent.

Saneze Tshayana is a PhD candidate in the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Dr Ana Stevenson is a Research Fellow in the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa, and an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Heritage and Culture at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Dr Monica G. Fernandes is a scholar of transnational women's activism in the twentieth century