As South Africa prepares to commemorate National Women’s Day, it is important to recognise why the occasion represents a crucial turning point in the country’s turbulent history, writes Najm Al-Din.
On 9 August 1956, an estimated 20,000 women from different racial backgrounds marched to the Union Buildings, the seat of the apartheid government.
Organised by the Federation of South African Women, the protesters delivered a petition bearing thousands of signatures to Prime Minister JG Strijdom. Their demands included equal pay, paid maternity leave and equal property rights for women.
When the prime minister refused to meet them, the women stood outside the government buildings in silence for 30 minutes before breaking into a unified song of defiance: “Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo” — “You strike a woman, you strike a rock.”
The phrase has since entered South Africa’s cultural lexicon as an enduring expression of female resilience and courage.
At the heart of the demonstration was opposition to the proposed extension of the Natives Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act to Black, Indian and coloured women.
Commonly known as the pass laws, this legislation functioned as a system of internal passports, strictly controlling urbanisation, restricting migrant labour and tearing families apart through regulations determining where people of colour could live, work and travel.
The pass laws stripped women of their dignity by treating them as second-class citizens. They institutionalised a system in which women were subjugated on the grounds of race, class and gender while facing constant harassment and surveillance by apartheid police.
The historic protest transformed the anti-apartheid liberation struggle and redefined the position of women within South African society.
Progress
The significance of the march was formally recognised after the end of apartheid, with 9 August being declared a national public holiday following South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
Since then, South African women have used the country’s post-apartheid legislative framework to secure significant political, economic and social rights.
Before 1994, South Africa’s political landscape was racially segregated and women were almost invisible within law-making institutions. In the final apartheid-era parliament, women occupied fewer than 3% of seats and were largely absent from discussions on national policy.
Today, South Africa ranks among the world’s leading countries for female political representation, with women occupying more than 45% of seats in the National Assembly.
This transformation is largely attributable to voluntary quota mechanisms adopted by political parties such as the African National Congress.
Women have also made significant economic gains.
Before democratic reforms, African women faced severe economic marginalisation. Under the Black Administration Act of 1927, married women were legally treated as minors and were unable to independently own property, enter binding contracts or open bank accounts.
Their participation in the labour market was largely confined to poorly paid and unregulated domestic or agricultural work.
Following the introduction of constitutional protections and labour reforms, women now occupy more than a third of senior management positions in the public sector and constitute the majority of undergraduate enrolments, reversing decades of discrimination in employment and education.
Historically, marriage laws denied many women equal rights to custody, inheritance and property, while providing little maternal or childcare support.
Today, family law reforms grant women greater legal equality and property rights. Social safety nets also provide millions of female-headed households with a financial lifeline, helping to reduce extreme poverty and improve food security among vulnerable families.
Obstacles
Despite this legal and political progress, a significant gap remains between South Africa’s progressive legislation and the daily reality experienced by millions of women.
In several areas of life, progress has either stagnated or alarmingly regressed.
Although the public sector has undergone substantial reform, women remain significantly underrepresented in management positions within private companies.
Alongside the private-sector glass ceiling, women experience disproportionately higher unemployment rates than men and continue to perform the majority of unpaid care work, limiting their ability to establish and expand formal businesses.
Despite obtaining more undergraduate qualifications than men, an entire generation of women remains economically vulnerable because of the widening gender pay gap and persistent occupational segregation.
Many are trapped in lower-paid and unstable informal employment without contracts, medical aid, safe childcare or pension provision.
While white and Asian women experience higher rates of upward mobility into professional positions, Black women remain heavily overrepresented in poorly paid and vulnerable forms of survivalist labour.
This is particularly evident in rural municipalities, where women experience some of the country’s worst economic inequalities, including inadequate housing, food insecurity, limited access to maternal healthcare and poor sanitation.
The regression is even more apparent in relation to women’s safety and physical security, particularly amid South Africa’s worsening crisis of gender-based violence and femicide.
The rate at which women are murdered remains several times higher than the global average. More than 40,000 rapes are officially reported annually, while women’s rights organisations estimate that the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults remain unreported because of fear, stigma and distrust of the authorities.
Despite the legal advances of recent decades, the enforcement of laws intended to protect women from violence remains deeply inadequate.
Surveys indicate that many South Africans believe the criminal justice system is failing to protect women from serious human rights violations.
This is unsurprising when poor evidence collection, low conviction rates and backlogs in forensic laboratories allow perpetrators to operate with effective impunity.
The implementation gap
Although South Africa possesses one of the world’s most progressive constitutions, many of the barriers preventing women from advancing remain structural and deeply embedded in the legacy of apartheid.
Colonial and patriarchal stereotypes depicting women as passive objects continue to endure. These attitudes are frequently weaponised to enforce gender hierarchies and punish women who attempt to exercise autonomy or achieve economic independence.
It is also true that mainstream rights discourse often centres Western conceptions of individual autonomy and liberal rights, which can conflict with the communal and family-centred ethos of Ubuntu and traditional African social structures.
For many indigenous women, a framework that places the individual in opposition to the community or family can be culturally disruptive.
However, even within homegrown activism that seeks to contextualise women’s rights within African cultural realities rather than imported frameworks, millions of women continue to suffer because of severe and persistent systemic failures.
An Islamic alternative
Amid widespread violence and systemic inequality, the Islamic tradition offers a compelling framework for women’s dignity, rights and empowerment.
The Islamic discourse on women’s rights is founded upon divinely sanctioned principles of equity, justice and complementary responsibilities.
This approach stands in contrast to imported Western feminist ideals and South Africa’s prevailing secular trajectory, both of which frequently define liberation through individual autonomy and adversarial relations between men and women.
Such paradigms can create cultural alienation within South Africa’s deeply religious and communally orientated societies.
While much of the country’s women’s rights discourse is premised upon secular-liberal principles that often connect a woman’s worth to her material productivity, Islamic law recognises a woman’s right to education, inheritance, employment, property ownership and economic independence without undermining the family structure or disregarding the spiritual and social importance of domestic and community stability.
In a world in which much of the gender-equality debate is anchored in Western and Eurocentric assumptions, Islam presents women’s rights not as concessions granted by human beings, governments or political movements, but as divinely mandated obligations.
Violating a woman’s rights therefore becomes not merely a legal offence, but a spiritual transgression.
This shifts accountability beyond external state enforcement and policing into the realm of personal conscience, religious duty and taqwa, or God-consciousness.
Rather than promoting rivalry between the genders, Islam establishes a framework of complementary partnership, protective responsibility and mutual support between men and women.
This system preserves and strengthens the family unit, an institution that remains deeply valued within South African culture.
The shared emphasis on family and community provides a natural point of connection between Islamic values and South African communal traditions, both of which recognise the family as the foundation of a healthy society.
As South Africa commemorates Women’s Month this August, Muslims have an opportunity to present a confident alternative vision of female agency, dignity and empowerment rooted in divine guidance rather than secular ideology.
According to Islam, men and women possess equal spiritual worth, human dignity and moral responsibility before Allah, establishing a foundation of respect that precedes and transcends political legislation.
Mosques, Islamic schools, community counselling centres and educational workshops can serve as platforms for civic and religious education, particularly in under-resourced townships.
Through these institutions, Muslims can demonstrate how many of the problems affecting South African women can be addressed through Islamic values founded upon justice, mutual respect, equitable responsibilities and community-driven accountability rooted in taqwa.
This requires reviving Prophetic teachings that reject abusive and destructive expressions of masculinity while affirming the God-given dignity of women and the value of femininity within a harmonious family structure.
By internalising these divine principles, South African women can be offered a transformative vision of female flourishing that protects their rights, strengthens families and restores moral accountability throughout society.
