August is Women's Month in South Africa - A History of Progressive Transformation

"You strike a woman; you strike a rock."

Black Women's Struggle and 1956 Women's March in South Africa

    August is Celebrated as Women's Month in South Africa.  

It commemorates the South African women's historic fight against the White supremacist colonial regime that subjected them to violence, detention, jail terms, poverty, and social, economic, and racial oppression.

Women's Struggle-Colonial History of South Africa and the Context  

    Let me give a brief on it to the readers who have no grasp of South Africa's colonial history. Geographically, the country is at the southern tip of Africa. To understand the narrative better, please follow the colonial map shown below. 

Courtesy of University of Texas Libraries, Perry-Castaneda-Library Map Collection: Historical Maps of Africa.

    Before the colonialists trespassed on South Africa, the land was the home to the Indigenous African populations. The southern Cape region/colony was home to the Koikoi tribes. The first colonial settlement in the region commenced with the arrival of Jan van Riebeek and the ninety employees of the Dutch East India Company in 1652. They were called Boers means farmers, who had Duch, German and French ancestry- presently called Afrikaners.  

    The British colonists arrived in 1820. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic war, the British government encouraged its people to immigrate to the Cape regions to escape unemployment.  

    Initially, the two colonist groups were at loggerheads with one another in their attitude towards the African population. Britain's interest was territorial expansion and the Boers to establish their own territories by oppressing the African people. Like other European descendants, the colonists believed God had established a human hierarchy as white Christians were superior to other races. The two groups fought two terrible wars for supremacy. Towards the 19th century, however, they began compromising talks to take the joint racial control of the African population mediated by the British Parliament, which culminated in the South Arica Act of 1909.    

 As per the act, the four colonies of South Africa joined together to form the Union of South Africa, its headquarters in Pretoria-the act finalised its legal framework to deny 'franchise to Black South Africans.'      

    The governance of the Union was premised on the Biblical racial theory of White Christian supremacy and of the Black African inferiority hence the need for segregated/graded developments for each.

   

    In 1913, as the first step toward segregation, the Colony of Orange Free State introduced Passes to Africans to control their influx into the White urban areas. They issued passes only to the Africans, who had permanent residence status, their wives, and single daughters. The poor and the work-seekers spotted in the urban areas without passes got arrested and sent to jails.   

Black Women's Struggle 

    The hardest hit among the affected population was the working-class Black women who lost the little income they earned working in the urban areas to support their poor households. And they couldn't meet with their husbands, employed in the White-owned mines and kept in single-sex hostels.    

    Those women felt the need to protest. They organised themselves into groups and opposed the Passes staging civil disobedience and demonstrations throughout the colony. They collected thousands of signatures and petitioned government officials. The police reacted by arresting and jailing them. After a while, the administrators withdrew the Passes, and the status quo remained for the coming four decades.  

  

    In 1948, the National Party got elected to power in the White-only national election. Soon, it implemented its superior-racial theory into practice with the support of all necessary legal frameworks- Apartheid.  It means separate development.     

    In 1952, the National Party government passed the Native Laws Amendment Act to legally restrict the African women's movement by reintroducing the Passes and Permits. The implementation waited until 1954 for the Passes and 1956 for the Permits. This time, it took off in the Western Cape Union and spread to the other Unions.    

 Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW or FSAW)    

    Women of all races felt the need to organise for improved actions. They founded the Federation of South African Women in Johannesburg on 17 April 1954. The Federation's main objective was to liberate the nation from the clutches of the Apartheid. And address the pressing issues affecting women, children, and the family. Ray Alexander Simons was its founding member, and soon Helen Joseph, Lilian Masediba Ngoyi and Amina Cachalia got incorporated into its steering committee. Women from Indian, African, Coloured, and White political organisations and trade unions joined it. One hundred and forty-six delegates representing 230,000 women attended its founding conference.  

  

    They formulated its Constitution demanding "secure full equality of opportunity for all women, regardless of race, colour or creed; to remove social, legal and economic disabilities; to work for the protection of the women and children." 

   

The Women's Charter

1956 March
The image is taken from pexels.com

   

 

    They drafted at the first conference, demanded, among other things, "the enfranchisement of men and women of all races; equality of opportunity in employment; equal pay for equal work; equal rights in relation to property, marriage and children; and the removal of all laws and customs that denied women such equality." 

Demands in the Women's Charter:  

  

    1. Abolish the 'tribal law' of the pre-industrial society that regarded African women as 'perpetual minors' 'under the permanent tutelage of their male guardians.'  

  

    2. Men cannot think of being liberated from the evils and injustices unless they extend to women, 'complete and unqualified equality in law and practice.' 

 

 

    3. No one section of the people or the entire nation achieves freedom if the women remain in bondage. 

    

    All those demands were incorporated into the 'Freedom Charter' a document that guided the African National Congress to shape the South African Constitution after independence in 1994. 

 

1956 March
The image was taken from pexels.com

    

    

    In 1956, two years after its formation, the Federation took itself the fight against the Pass Laws. On August 9, 20,000 women of all races marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria. The then prime minister JG Strijdom though notified of their arrival, didn't make himself available to receive the petition. The petition, however, didn't make a change of heart in the colonists.   

    However, the march marked a victory for the entire women in South Africa. It shattered the cliché that a woman's place is home and made a breakthrough transformation of their life from traditional to modern to embrace humanity and universalism. In memory of the march, 9 August got into the annals of South African history as National Women's Day celebrated until the day and August as Women's Month.   

Given below are some demands in the 9 August 1956 petition: 

    "We are the women from every part of South Africa. We are women of every race, we come from the cities and the towns, from the reserves and the villages." 

   

    "We come as women united in our purpose to save the African woman from the degradation of passes."  

    "In the name of women of South Africa, we say to you, each one of us, African, European, Indian, Coloured, that we are opposed to the pass system. We voters and voteless, call upon your Government not to issue passes to African women."  

 

    "We shall not rest until All pass laws and all forms of permits restricting our freedom have been abolished. We shall not rest until we have won for our children their fundamental rights of freedom, justice, and security." 

   

    They concluded the demonstration by singing the infamous song, "when you strike a woman, you strike a rock." 

   

Women in Democratic South Africa  

    Apartheid met with its demise in 1994. The African National Congress, the political party that led the freedom struggle against Apartheid, took over the nation's governance. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa was adopted on 18 December 1996. 

    RSA's Constitution is qualified as the most progressive one in the world. Its Chapter 2, The Bill of Rights, takes care of every demand set in the women's Freedom Charter in 1954 and much more than that. "This Bill of Rights is the cornerstone of democracy in South Africa. It enshrines the rights of all the people in our country and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality, and freedom."

    In the post-freedom era in South Africa, the race is outdated constitutionally. But the women's fight takes new forms and directions against sexism and gender-based violence and for land. All gods ordained discrimination got dumped in the waste bins, giving the stage for a new--money god, the African women most affected by its power strategy and the historical discrimination.

 

The Women's Fight Continues  

    The women's fight continues at its new levels, aiming at levelling new economic, gender and sexism disparities without losing its 1954 spirit of unity and determination. 

Conclusion

 

    1. I believe the South African women's march in 1956 and its outcome could make a change of heart in the women (and men) who seek the comfort and advantage of the myth that God has created a human hierarchy and looks down on those at the 'lower rungs.'

    2 I wonder how societies that cling to the age-old myths as statuesque protective measures can contribute toward building a progressive mindset in the future generation.

Please let me know what you think about the content of this post.

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  This post is the last among the four things I plan to do in August shown in my post as part of BlogAChatterBloghop