Seventy years after South Africa’s women’s march, the struggle is not over | Women’s Rights

Johannesburg, South Africa – Seventy years in the past, Sophie Williams-de Bruyn was 18 when she joined about 20,000 girls marching to the Union Buildings, the seat of South Africa’s apartheid authorities, to protest in opposition to the extension of the move legal guidelines to Black girls.

On August 9, 1956, the ladies gathered in Pretoria carrying a petition in opposition to legal guidelines that restricted the motion of Black South Africans. Williams-de Bruyn was among the many leaders of the march, which turned one of many defining moments of the nation’s liberation battle.

On Sunday, at 88, she returned to the identical grounds.

The nation round her had modified. Apartheid had ended, South Africa had grow to be a democracy and girls had moved into a number of the nation’s highest workplaces. Its structure ensures equality and safety from discrimination.

However for a lot of girls, the freedoms received by way of that political transformation haven’t translated into safety, financial alternative or dependable public companies.

“How can we totally rejoice our previous victories when our current actuality is so deeply disappointing and distressful?” Williams-de Bruyn requested.

Her query set a sombre tone for this 12 months’s Nationwide Girls’s Day commemorations, which marked 70 years for the reason that historic march.

What the ladies of 1956 received

The ladies who marched in 1956 have been difficult one in all apartheid’s most seen devices of racial management. The move legal guidelines regulated the place Black South Africans might stay and work, and the federal government deliberate to increase these restrictions to Black girls.

The ladies delivered their petitions on the Union Buildings and stood in silence for half-hour earlier than leaving. The protest turned an emblem of ladies’s resistance and is now commemorated every year as Nationwide Girls’s Day.

Almost 4 a long time later, apartheid was dismantled.

South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 introduced a brand new political order, adopted by a structure that positioned equality and human dignity at its centre. Girls entered Parliament in important numbers and moved into senior positions throughout authorities, the judiciary and different establishments.

President Cyril Ramaphosa pointed to these positive aspects throughout Sunday’s commemoration, highlighting South Africa’s progress in girls’s political illustration, schooling, monetary inclusion and participation in decision-making.

Girls now maintain a number of the nation’s highest positions, together with chief justice, parliament speaker and public protector.

However political illustration has not introduced equal financial safety.

“Girls are greater than half of our inhabitants, however they don’t but maintain an equal share of our nation’s wealth, its land or its enterprises,” Ramaphosa stated.

Cassandra Dorasamy, a campaigner at Amnesty Worldwide South Africa, informed Al Jazeera that whereas the nation had made progress in girls’s illustration, it had not seen the identical enchancment within the lives of nearly all of girls.

“We’ve seen progress when it comes to girls’s illustration in Parliament, corporations and native authorities buildings, however we now have not seen the identical significant progress within the realities of nearly all of girls within the nation,” she stated.

Violence and worry

Nowhere is that pressure extra seen than in South Africa’s persevering with disaster of gender-based violence.

South African police recorded 9,782 reported rapes between January and March 2026, together with 12,590 sexual offences. That quantities to roughly 108 reported rapes each day.

Virtually half of these reported rapes, 4,620, or 47.2 p.c, occurred on the residence of the sufferer or the perpetrator, based on police statistics.

In November final 12 months, the Nationwide Catastrophe Administration Centre categorized gender-based violence and femicide as a nationwide catastrophe following sustained stress from civil society organisations.

Ramaphosa informed the gathering that girls proceed to stay with the specter of violence “within the streets, even of their houses”.

However rights teams say declaring a catastrophe is barely a primary step.

Dorasamy stated Amnesty Worldwide had heard accounts from girls who struggled to open instances, have been dismissed when reporting violence or acquired little data after making complaints.

Some girls ultimately withdraw their instances, she stated, as a result of the method turns into so troublesome and exhausting that they now not see a profit in persevering with.

The financial divide

The financial image is equally uneven.

South Africa’s unemployment price stood at 32.7 p.c within the first quarter of 2026, based on Statistics South Africa. For girls, it was 36.4 p.c, in contrast with 29.6 p.c for males. Amongst Black African girls, the unemployment price reached 40.5 p.c.

Girls have been additionally much less possible than males to take part within the labour power, at 53.8 p.c in contrast with 65.6 p.c.

Amongst folks aged 15 to 24, 39.2 p.c of younger girls and ladies have been neither employed nor in schooling or coaching, in contrast with 36 p.c of younger males and boys.

For girls attempting to construct unbiased lives, unemployment can deepen dependence on relations or companions and make it more durable to assist youngsters or depart abusive relationships.

In poorer and rural communities, these pressures are sometimes compounded by restricted entry to land, productive sources and dependable public companies.

The roots of these inequalities attain again to apartheid and earlier methods of racial dispossession, which denied Black South Africans entry to land, capital and financial alternative. Girls confronted further restrictions by way of discriminatory legal guidelines and social buildings.

Democracy modified the political system, nevertheless it didn’t erase a long time of financial exclusion.

The unfinished promise

That pressure was on the centre of Williams-de Bruyn’s speech.

She described girls as prisoners in their very own houses regardless of the democratic freedoms received after apartheid, and spoke of poverty, homelessness, an absence of fresh consuming water and systemic corruption.

“We fought to dismantle the yokes of systemic oppression of ladies as a race, class and gender,” she stated.

She acquired a standing ovation.

The commemorations additionally took on a global dimension with the attendance of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

Ramaphosa praised Yousafzai’s braveness and used the event to specific solidarity with girls and ladies in Afghanistan who’ve been systematically excluded from schooling, employment and public life.

However it was Williams-de Bruyn’s reflections that lingered lengthy after the speeches had ended.

Seventy years after that march, girls maintain positions of energy that will have been virtually unimaginable below apartheid. But for thousands and thousands, violence, unemployment, poverty and insufficient public companies nonetheless form what freedom means in on a regular basis life.

“This isn’t the liberty we marched for.”