8 August 2022
We Gather in a Time of Deep Crisis on Women’s Day
On Women’s Day, August 9 in South Africa, we are reminded of the 20,000 women who marched on the Union Buildings in 1956. They showed us that Unity is the Power.
We celebrate these women and all the women whose names are not remembered in the official celebrations who struggled in community organisations and trade unions and held families together under a brutal system of oppression. We celebrate women like Florence Mkhize, Dorothy Nyembe, Sophie de Bruin, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, Victoria Mxenge, Jabu Ndlovu and many, many others, including our own mothers and grandmothers.
THOSE WHO DIED FOR FREEDOM
We also celebrate the women in our own movement who have given their lives in the struggle. In 2013 Nqobile Nzuza was murdered by the Cato Manor Police. She was only 17 years old. In 2014 Thuli Ndlovu was murdered in Kwa Ndengezi by a hit man paid by two ANC councillors. Nokuthula Mabaso was murdered by a hit man at the eKhenena Commune in May 2022.
We will be having our Women’s Day event at the Dennis Hurley Centre on 9 and 10 August. Our theme is “Let’s Break the Silence and Support Each Other.” On 9 August we will be discussing parenting, gender based violence and femicide. On 10 August we will be discussing women in leadership, women and livelihoods and women and land.
Abahlali acknowledges and encourages all women participating in the living politics of fighting for their rights and to fulfill the vision and mission of our movement. Our Women’s League wants to create awareness about issues that affect women on daily basis, e.g., patriarchy, impoverishment, unemployment, parenting challenges, the addiction epidemic that is hurting our children, gender-based violence, femicide, evictions, state violence, ANC repression and financial autonomy. Most of all we want to support the work to build women’s power in struggle.
Like the whole country we are very distressed at the news that keeps coming in of more women being raped and murdered. We need to build a strong women’s movement centrally, including poor and working-class women who are the majority, and including all women without regard for where they were born, to bring this crisis to an end. The government is failing us, the police are failing us, the courts are failing us, the political parties are failing us and the media is failing us. The only way out of this crisis is to build women’s power in a mass democratic movement.
We have our stokvels (invitation-only clubs of twelve or more people serving as rotating credit unions or saving schemes) and other livelihood projects that we share, but we also need access to land so that we can build food sovereignty. Land and wealth must be fairly shared.
DOWN WITH PATRIARCHY
We welcome guests from a number of organisations at the event. We wish to express our solidarity with Nomzamo Zondo and all our comrades at SERI who have come under attack by the growing fascist forces that are organising around xenophobia. SERI has always stood with the struggles of the oppressed and we stand with them. An injury to one is an injury to all.
Women have faced patriarchy for so long. Now is the time to show the world that the place of a woman is not in the kitchen, it is in the struggle. Women’s power is the foundation of the living politics.
Womandla!
Contact: Khunjuzwa Nomtebe 073 042 1479, Zipho Maphela 069 572 1094, Bongiwe Nkabinde 061 928 0661
Land & Dignity!
–Abahlali baseMjondolo