South Africa commemorates on Sunday 70 years since the Women’s March of 1956, when about 20,000 women of all races marched to the administrative capital, Pretoria, to protest apartheid laws forcing black women to carry passes that restricted their movement.
Ramnie Dinat, 84, was just a teenager during the August 9 1956 march and recalled helping her mother, Ama Naidoo, an anti-apartheid activist, organize women before the rally.
Black women, women of Indian heritage like Naidoo, and even some white women marched that day.
“Black women were organizing, and Indian women couldn’t be silent,” Dinat told The Associated Press, adding that nobody at the time imagined that “history would remember that day.”
“We were ordinary women who believed we could make a difference. We simply believed it was the right thing to do.”
Seven decades after risking arrest, torture and even death to challenge racist laws, many women say their fight for freedom is unfinished as they continue to grapple with high rates of gender-based violence, poverty and inequality.
A UN Women-supported study in 2024 found more than one in three South African women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.
Perched on a ridge overlooking central Johannesburg, the Women’s Jail was a cornerstone of South Africa’s apartheid prison system and today it’s a museum that stands near the Constitutional Court as a reminder of the country’s journey from oppression to democracy.
Many of the march’s leaders and participants were later imprisoned in the Women’s Jail, where activists were held separately according to their race just as apartheid enforced segregation everywhere in South Africa.
The museum honors not only famous figures like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela — Nelson Mandela’s second wife — and Albertina Sisulu, who became icons of the anti-apartheid struggle, but also thousands of ordinary women whose names rarely appear in history books and whose sacrifices went unnoticed.
“Our freedom is built on the shoulders of those kinds of women who were at this prison,” museum manager Nolubabalo Memese said.
Kgothatso Montjane, 40, is one of the country’s most successful para-athletes; she won the 2024 Wimbledon wheelchair doubles title.
“Today I’m the first Black South African woman to compete in all four major tennis tournaments,” she told the AP.
The tennis star said the 1956 march fight has “paved the way for us.”
Montjane said structural inequalities are still evident in sport, where financial obstacles determine who gets access to elite competition, noting “The barriers I had to overcome … in a sport like tennis, it’s just a financial issue.”
“They don’t lie when they say tennis is a white sport, and you don’t really find people of color dominating in this sport.”
While apartheid ended in 1994 and South African women are no longer restricted from moving, working or participating in society, Memese said gender violence can still deny them freedom, describing “a different monster which precludes us from enjoying freedom of movement and economic participation. And that’s gender-based violence. That’s crime.”
“If you want to go jog at six o’clock and it’s a bit dark, you’d rather not,” she added.
The UN has described the country’s high rates of violence against women and girls as a crisis.
Government data shows women are more likely than men to be unemployed and remain underrepresented in senior leadership roles.
In the viral moment that defined South Africa’s anti-apartheid resistance, on 9 August 1956, about 20,000 women marched to Pretoria’s Union Buildings, the centre of the South African Government, arriving by train and walking in small groups of twos and threes since large groups were banned by authorities.
Leading the march were Lillian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn.
Representatives of each race group carried 14,000 petitions for presentation to Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom, but he was not available, being elsewhere so as not to accept the petition from a multicultural group of women, so his Secretary received it instead.
“Every generation has its own struggles, and every generation has to decide whether it will stand up for what is right,” Dinat said in reflecting on the lesson that endures.
South Africa observes National Women’s Day annually on August 9 in commemoration of the march.