SA’s women still held back by a hidden dompas: male prejudice
Today is the last day of Women’s Month 2025. As has become custom over the past 31 years since the dawn of the democratic non-racial dispensation in this country, August is celebrated in honour of the women who confronted apartheid and marched against pass laws in 1956.
The apartheid project had captured state power in 1948, and by 1956, the process of consolidating its complete grip on power was truly underway. Worse was still to come, but the oppressed masses were still buoyed, perhaps by events that took place a year earlier when the Congress of the People took place at Kliptown, Soweto, to famously adopt the Freedom Charter.
The charter was a document far removed from the racist, fascist designs of apartheid on the majority of the people.
While black men bore the physical brunt of the cruelty of apartheid in their interaction with its functionaries in their daily existence, nay, survival, for that is what apartheid had reduced the lot of the African to, African women became the most oppressed demographic.
At the time, JG Strijdom, the sitting prime minister of the then Union of South Africa, sought to turn his attention to what would obviously be the natural repository of the people’s power to resist apartheid – African women.
Up to that point, only black men – regarded as nothing more than an inexhaustible source of cheap labour on which apartheid depended – were required to carry the dompas. The dompas was a hated document that decided the movements and the fate of the black man in ‘white’ SA.
Strijdom must have admired apartheid’s handiwork on the African and felt the urge to extend the privilege to African women. Thus, a dompas for women was born. Its introduction stoked the fires of resistance anew, leading to the famed march.
The struggle of womenfolk, unfortunately is still far from over despite SA having made gigantic progress down this hallowed path of freedom. Somehow, we have always found ways to deny women the wholesome fruit of our emancipation.
Women have proved time and again that they are more than capable, even more so than men, to deliver what is required, and much more. Often, incompetent men are hoisted into positions they hardly deserve, while women are overlooked to the detriment of the nation.
We doubt there is any justifiable reason for this country not to have had a female president, despite the sheer abundance down the years of well-equipped women who would no doubt have done the job with aplomb. Instead, SA has been made to live with mediocrity simply because of the insatiable greed of men.
Another succession is unfolding in the biggest political party, yet again, women are restricted to the periphery. It is an invisible dompas that they continue to carry while being pummelled no end by femicide, GBV and general misogyny at every level of life.
Come on SA, we can do better. We are all born of a woman and would do well to play our part, however small, in casting aside the chains that have held back women, and indeed the nation at large. Malibongwe igama la makhosikazi.
