MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Remembering the women who history has erased, shamed and rendered invisible
'Many of the women who contributed to our struggle for freedom are unknown, except as a numerical description, such as that “more than 20 000 women marched to the Union Buildings in 1956.'
FILE: A picture taken on 13 April 1986 shows Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, then-wife of South African president Nelson Mandela and anti-apartheid campaigner, addressing a meeting in Kagiso township. Picture: AFP.
August is an important month on the calendar of South Africa. It is a month during which we commemorate the courage of the more than 20,000 women who, on the 9th of August 1956, marched to the seat of the apartheid government, the Union Buildings in Pretoria, to demand the abolishment of pass laws and to challenge the dehumanising and de-civilising apartheid system that had relegated Black people to a zone of non-being.
When the story of the 1956 Women’s March is told, certain names rise to prominence, with women such as Lilian Ngoyi, Frances Baard, Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, Helen Joseph, Charlotte Maxeke and Rahima Moosa being recognised as the organisers of the march.
And they were. As leaders of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) these women, united in their diversity, redefined history by confronting the might of a regime whose brutality they knew too well.
But they were willing to pay the price to challenge it, to stand before the Prime Minister of the apartheid government, Hans Strijdom, and deliver a memorandum demanding the right of women to exist, and of Black men to be human.
Theirs are not the only names that rise to the top of the list when women who fought in our country’s struggle for liberation are mentioned.
Names such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Helen Suzman, Albertina Sisulu, Ida Mntwana, Amina Cachalia and Ruth First are also some of the names that are familiar to many South Africans.
Though not as well-known as their male counterparts, their stories not as widely told, these women who fought against the colonial and apartheid regimes are at least remembered.
Monuments have been built in their honour, songs have been sung about them, theatre productions have been staged in celebration of their legacies, streets and buildings have been named after them, and they form part of vague memory of the long walk to our country’s democracy.
But there are millions of other women whose names will never be known – grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, fighters whom history has completely erased from memory.
They have been relegated to the margins of official narratives, their voices overshadowed by the towering figures of male leaders and the sweep of political events. In some cases, their stories have been completely distorted with the aim to demonise them.
No story highlights this as prominently as that of Nongqawuse, a young girl who history writes about as the perpetrator of famine.
The brilliant sociologist and historian, Dr JJ Klass, spins this narrative on its head in his profoundly important book, Triangle of One Hundred Years Wars, which is rightly regarded as a groundbreaking work in the decolonisation of South African history.
He debunks the false colonial narrative of Nongqawuse as the facade of the biological weapon of mass cattle decimation of AmaXhosa, contending that the architecting of the Nongqawuse narrative was a cover-up in order to hide the historical fact that the resistance of AmaXhosa was broken by decimating their productive capabilities through the continuation of the war through the introduction of the devastating European cattle lung sickness.
Klaas contends that AmaXhosa killed their cattle in order to arrest the spread of the European cattle lung sickness, not, as textbooks would have us believe, because a teenage Nongqawuse had a prophecy that gave rise to a devastating famine that claimed many lives of AmaXhosa.
Klaas provides a reason for this distortion, stating that the false colonial narrative of Nongqawuse created deep-seated psychological scars of shame, self-hatred and a mental inferiority complex, and that “to a certain extent the Nongqawuse narrative contributed to the creation of a permanent state of psychological self-induced surrender and submission”.
Nongqawuse is not the only woman whom history has either shamed or completely erased. From the early days of anti-colonial resistance to the struggle against apartheid, women have organised, led, and sacrificed immeasurably.
And yet, many of their names have been buried beneath the layers of history books, their contributions relegated to footnotes if at all mentioned.
For this reason, many of the women who contributed to our struggle for freedom are unknown, except as a numerical description, such as that “more than 20 000 women marched to the Union Buildings in 1956”.
Who these women were, the geo-histories that shaped their lives, the burdens they had to carry – all this is unknown. But it is not only the fighters whose names we do not know.
It is not only the grandmothers whose homes were a sanctuary for freedom fighters, the mothers who made the difficult decision to send their own children off to Mozambique, Angola, Tanzania or Libya to train as guerillas, or the young women who tendered to the wounds inflicted on those who fought in Self-Defence Units in our townships.
It is not only these whose names are unknown and stories untold. It is also the victims – the hundreds of thousands of women in townships who were jackrolled.
It remains the greatest injustice that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) did not deal with cases of systematic sexual violence against women. Despite the fact that jackrolling – the brutal rape of women by young men during party political conflicts in townships – was used as a weapon of war, it was not engaged with during TRC proceedings, nor was it declared as a specific and particular crime against humanity in the context of apartheid in the way that rape as a weapon of war is classified in other civil wars and conflicts.
What this means is that many Black women in our country endured this brutality that was committed in the open, in public spaces such as schools, parks, train stations, shebeens and even on the streets, but are unknown, their perpetrators unpunished. The erasure of women from history is thus not only the erasure of their heroism, but of their brutal victimisation too.
As we commemorate Women’s Month in 2025, we must remember not only the names that are known, but the many that are not. We must recognise that this erasure of women from our memory is not accidental, but is woven into the very structures that have shaped our nation’s understanding of itself.
This invisibility persists beyond grand political moments and commemorations. In the arts, sciences, education, sports, and governance, women’s contributions have often been understated or completely ignored.
Fewer men receive the honour that great women, ordinary women who did extraordinary things, are denied.
Challenging the erasure of women in South African history is a moral obligation. It is not merely about rewriting the past - it's about reconstructing the very fabric of national memory.
We must recognise the multitude of ways that women have shaped, and continue to shape, this country that we call home. Their stories must be unearthed and told.
Their lives and contributions to our freedom matter even as the erasure persists. Such erasure is deliberate, for as Indian writer and activist, Arundhati Roy so profoundly puts it: “There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
Malaika, a bestselling and award-winning author, is a geographer and researcher at the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation. She is a PhD in Geography candidate at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.