Physical Address
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It started decades before any of us were born. On 9 August 1956, thousands of South African women — Black women at the forefront — marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to challenge the apartheid government’s pass laws, those brutal restrictions that controlled where Black people could go, work, and simply exist. They chanted. They demanded to be seen. That moment became history.
Seventy years later, on Sunday, the Union Buildings hosted a commemoration of that march. The theme was clear and deliberate: “empowered women empower nations.” South Africa was not just looking back — it was looking outward, connecting its own painful past to a crisis unfolding right now, thousands of kilometres away in Afghanistan.
President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the keynote address. He didn’t hold back. He drew a direct line between apartheid South Africa and the Taliban’s Afghanistan, reminding the crowd that South Africans know exactly what it feels like when a government weaponises the law against its own people. “South Africans know what it means when the law is used to determine where people may go, what they may learn, what work they may do and what place they may occupy in society,” he said.
His words landed hard. “No culture, religion, government or ideology can justify reducing women to lesser human beings.” Full stop.
The guest of honour that day was Malala Yousafzai — Nobel Peace Prize laureate, global education activist, and someone who paid a near-fatal price for believing girls deserve to learn. In October 2012, when she was just 15 years old, Taliban gunmen shot her in the head on her school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. Her crime was insisting that girls had a right to go to school. She survived. She kept speaking.
Two years after the attack, in 2014, she won the Nobel Peace Prize. And on Sunday she stood at the Union Buildings, telling the crowd that the women of 1956 had directly inspired her own fight. That legacy, she said, was the very reason she had come back to South Africa.
Yousafzai spoke with urgency about what is happening in Afghanistan today. Since the Taliban retook control in August 2021, they have dismantled every structure that once protected women’s rights — courts, police, public administration, all bent to enforce their repression. Girls are now barred from attending school beyond sixth grade. Afghanistan stands alone in the world as the only country that forbids girls from secondary education entirely.
She gave it a name. Yousafzai called the Taliban’s systematic exclusion of Afghan women from education, employment and public life gender apartheid. The word choice was not accidental — it was a direct appeal to South Africans, asking them to recognise a familiar evil wearing a different face.
She recalled the rallying cry of the 1956 marchers: “An insult to African women is an insult to all women.” That declaration, she argued, belongs to Afghan women too. “We have come to honour your heroes, to learn from your movement, and to ask for your solidarity in our own fight against oppression,” she told the crowd.
Ramaphosa responded to that call directly. Through Yousafzai’s presence, he said, South Africa was extending its solidarity to every woman and girl in Afghanistan being shut out of classrooms, workplaces and public spaces. He praised Yousafzai’s resilience head-on: “A cruel ideology tried to silence you, but you rose to become one of the most strident voices for the emancipation of women in our world today.”
The 1956 march was always bigger than one country. Sunday proved it still is. The courage of South African women — who faced both racial oppression and patriarchy simultaneously, and chose to lead anyway — continues to travel across borders and generations, landing now in the hands of Afghan girls who are fighting just to sit in a classroom. The struggle is not over. It just keeps finding new fronts.
