The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) commemorates Women’s Day by paying tribute to the revolutionary women who, on 9 August 1956, marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria in defiance of the apartheid regime and its oppressive pass laws. The women of 1956, led by revolutionary figures such as Lilian Ngoyi, Rahima Moosa, Helen Joseph, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, demonstrated that women were active agents in the struggle for political, social and economic liberation.
Their march was an act of defiance against a system that sought to control where Black women could live, work, travel, and exist. Seventy years later, their courage remains a reminder that liberation is never given freely by those who benefit from oppression; it must be demanded and fought for.
South Africa has made important advances in the legal and political emancipation of women since 1956. The apartheid state that denied Black women basic political and civil rights has been dismantled, and the democratic Constitution recognises women and men as equal before the law. Women today have the right to vote, to stand for political office, to own property, to enter professions and to participate equally in the political life of the country.
There has also been substantial progress in the political representation of women. South Africa has consistently maintained one of the highest levels of female representation in national legislatures globally, with women occupying a substantial proportion of seats in Parliament. Women have served as Speakers of Parliament, Chief Justices, Premiers, Mayors, Ministers, and leaders of political organisations. Women have increasingly entered professions such as law, medicine, engineering, academia, science and business, while women athletes, artists, journalists, activists and academics have broken barriers in spaces that were historically closed to them. The democratic state has also established institutions and laws specifically aimed at advancing gender equality and protecting women. The constitutional recognition of gender equality, the establishment of the Commission for Gender Equality, legislation addressing domestic violence and sexual offences, and policies aimed at advancing women in government and the workplace represent important institutional gains. South Africa has also developed one of the world’s more progressive legal frameworks on reproductive rights, giving women the legal right to make decisions concerning their reproductive health.
However, the EFF refuses to confuse these advances with the completion of women’s emancipation. The existence of formal rights does not automatically produce substantive equality. The central contradiction of post-apartheid South Africa is that we have achieved significant political and legal transformation without sufficiently transforming the economic structures that continue to reproduce inequality.
The majority of women remain economically vulnerable. Women continue to experience higher levels of unemployment and economic exclusion, while millions survive through social grants, informal trading, precarious employment and low-paid work. Women remain heavily concentrated in domestic work, care work, cleaning, retail, agriculture and other sectors characterised by low wages and insecure conditions.
The economy continues to depend on forms of labour that are disproportionately performed by women while undervaluing that labour. The woman who raises children, cares for elderly relatives, cleans homes and performs other forms of unpaid reproductive labour contributes enormously to society and the economy, yet that contribution is frequently invisible in economic policy.
The greatest failure of the democratic state, however, remains its inability to protect women and girls from violence. South Africa continues to experience horrific levels of gender-based violence, femicide, rape, sexual assault and domestic violence. Women are killed by intimate partners, girls are sexually abused, and survivors frequently encounter a criminal justice system that is slow, inaccessible or indifferent. The state has adopted numerous plans and made countless declarations, but women continue to live with the knowledge that the person who threatens their lives may be someone they know, while the institutions meant to protect them may fail to act in time.
The continued violence against girls is particularly shameful. A girl should not have to calculate whether she is safe walking to school. She should not miss school because she cannot afford menstrual products. She should not be sexually exploited because of poverty. She should not be abused by someone she trusts and then encounter a system that fails to protect her. She should not grow up in a society where women are constantly instructed to change their behaviour to avoid violence while insufficient attention is paid to changing the behaviour of men who commit that violence.
The EFF further condemns the continued economic abandonment of single mothers. Women are too often left to carry the financial and emotional responsibility of raising children while fathers evade their obligations. The child maintenance system remains inaccessible and burdensome for many women, requiring mothers to navigate institutions that should instead be proactively assisting them. The EFF has consistently called for effective, accessible and responsive child maintenance courts that ensure children receive the support to which they are legally entitled and that fathers who deliberately refuse to comply with maintenance orders face meaningful consequences.
The EFF therefore maintains that women’s emancipation must be located within the broader struggle for economic freedom. Land must be redistributed to those who were dispossessed; women must have access to capital and markets; state procurement must deliberately support women-owned businesses and cooperatives; and women must have access to quality education and healthcare. The state must also provide the social infrastructure necessary to reduce the burden of unpaid care work, and women must have meaningful ownership and control of productive resources.
In celebration thereon, the EFF calls upon President Ramaphosa in this month of women to using his presidential pardon powers to order the release of all mothers convicted of petty crimes in South African prisons who have minor children. By executing a presidential remission of sentence, he will reunite these primary-caregiver mothers with their families. President Mandela did pardon this category of women in 1994, and to date no single President has done so. This is, therefore, an opportunity for the country to emulate, and walk the talk of the founding father of a free democratic South Africa.
The EFF recognises and celebrates the progress achieved since 1956 precisely because we understand that these gains were won through struggle. Seventy years later, we honour the women of 1956 by continuing the struggle against every structure that denies women freedom.
The EFF has been involved in high-profile parliamentary disruptions to draw attention to issues.
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Fun South African Fact: While the country only covers 1% of the Earth’s land surface, South Africa boasts 10% of the world’s bird, fish and plant species as well as 6% of its mammal and reptile species!