August, Women’s Month, is an important month in SA’s calendar.
It commemorates the historic 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings, the seat of the apartheid government.
On August 9 1956, a group of more than 20,000 women marched to Pretoria protesting draconian apartheid-era pass laws that were designed to restrict the movement of black people, including women.
Aware of the violence and brutality that could befall them, the women, singing in unison, “Wa thinth’abafazi, wathinth’imbokod!” (You strike a woman, you strike a rock), marched for kilometres, determined to hand over a memorandum and list of demands to then prime minister, JG Strijdom.
Despite his refusal to meet with the women, the legacy of that day has reverberated through time, cementing women as active participants in their own liberation.
Almost seven decades later, gender-based violence is tearing communities asunder, with women and children on the receiving end of the unimaginable brutality, the scourge of which has left many despondent.
However, there are many women in our communities who are determined to fight this scourge.
Many of them are unknown, as the erasure/invisibility of black women in particular, is normative.
But at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) in Gqeberha, a group of women academics are running with the baton even as it gets heavier with each step.
They are leading the Centre for Women and Gender Studies (CWGS), a dynamic and transformative academic hub devoted to advancing critical scholarship, research, and activism on issues related to women and gender in SA and the world.
The centre stands at the intersection of academic inquiry and community engagement, nurturing a generation of scholars, practitioners, and activists who are passionate about challenging gender-based oppression and fostering equity.
At the heart of this work are two extraordinary women — professors Pumla Dineo Gqola and Babalwa Magoqwana.
Gqola is the SA Research Chairs Initiative’s African Feminist Imagination chair and is dedicated to the study of creative sites of feminist expression, including but not limited to literature, visual arts, film, music, dance, and popular culture.
Magoqwana, whom I had the pleasure of being lectured by at Rhodes University more than a decade ago, is a renowned sociologist and the director of the centre.
While the centre has other women in its staff, and this article does not intend to minimise their role and contributions to the work that the CWGS is doing, it is important, as Women’s Month draws to an end, that we give Gqola and Magoqwana their flowers for the critical work they are doing for our country.
Their leadership has transformed the centre into a leading institution in Africa for the study of women and gender, producing cutting-edge research that influences policy and practice, and serving as a catalyst for societal change.
By fostering feminist scholarship and activism that addresses the complex realities of gender in the postcolonial, post-apartheid context, while also connecting these local experiences to broader global struggles for gender justice, they have linked our own struggles with those of women across the Global South, cementing practical international solidarity.
This is important, for women of the global majority, despite our differences in geography, culture and histories, share a common struggle against systematic and institutionalised heteronormative patriarchal violence.
It is in seeing this universality, this commonality, that we can begin to mobilise and organise.
It is also in this commonality that we can foreground the voices and experiences of people on the margins, who, as argued by Indian scholar and activist, Arudhati Roy, are deliberately unheard.
As we commemorate the women of 1956, we must also celebrate those who, in 2025, are working and fighting hard to make SA liveable for women and children.
As a young black woman who has known the horrors of violence, and who, daily, walks the streets of Johannesburg with crippling anxiety, it gives me comfort to know that women like Gqola and Magoqwana exist.
Because of their existence and the other staff at the CWGS, I know another world is possible.
The Herald
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