Issued by: GCIS
A sombre mood hangs over the 43rd anniversary of the march by 20 000 South African women on Union Buildings to protest against the pass laws. Women's Day on 9 August - and Women's Week preceding that day - have traditionally been a celebration of the tremendous strides made since that auspicious day in 1956.
There is much that we have to be proud of. Almost thirty per cent of our new members of parliament; 24 per cent of our cabinet ministers; and over half of our deputy ministers are women compared to virtually none in the apartheid days. Most of the blatant discrimination against women that existed in the past has been expunged from our statute books.
Yet this year's Women's Week and indeed Women's Month takes place in the dark shadow of the relentless scourge of violence against women. Violent rape is a metaphorical death threat that stalks every South African girl and woman and has become even more real with the ever increasing threat of AIDS that accompanies each rape - some of which are being carried out on the pretext of curing the disease. Indeed the fastest growing rate of the disease, which now infects one out of every five South Africans, is among young women.
This year's issue around Women's Day is thus dedicated not to celebration, but to mourning. To mourning the countless and often nameless girls and women who have been gang raped; sometimes killed instantly; sometimes dying a slow death with such a frequency that they have become the subject of nonchalant news items. We are mourning the catastrophe called AIDS, which is now with us and epitomises the deep gender inequities in our society.
Some activists are calling for a "national emergency" to collectively focus attention and clamp down on violence against women. It is the notion of "collective will" that we must consider on August 9th when we remember those gallant women who marched in 1956. They confronted the entire apartheid machinery with nothing more than their belief in justice. We need to tackle head on the scourges of violence against women and AIDS / HIV with the belief that justice will only be done when the women of South Africa are as free as men in this society. Until then, to borrow from a trade union slogan, "An Injury To One Is An Injury To All".
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30 July 1999