Government's 70-year reckoning: South Africa marks women's protest legacy amid accountabil

Seventy years after 20,000 women gathered at the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the extension of pass laws to Black women, South Africa’s government marked the anniversary on Sunday with a commemoration that exposed the distance between constitutional promise and institutional delivery.

President Cyril Ramaphosa used the occasion to acknowledge both progress and failure. Women now occupy the country’s highest offices, including chief justice, parliament speaker and public protector, and the constitution guarantees equality and protection from discrimination. Yet Ramaphosa conceded the limits of that political transformation: “Women are more than half of our population, but they do not yet hold an equal share of our country’s wealth, its land or its enterprises.”

The accountability question is sharpest in the area of gender-based violence. Police statistics recorded 9,782 reported rapes and 12,590 sexual offences between January and March 2026, a rate of roughly 108 reported rapes every day. Nearly half of those reported rapes, 4,620 cases or 47.2 percent, occurred at the home of the victim or the perpetrator. In November last year, the National Disaster Management Centre classified gender-based violence and femicide as a national disaster, following sustained pressure from civil society organisations. Declaring a disaster confers formal recognition. It does not, by itself, fix the system.

Rights groups say the system is failing at the most basic level. Cassandra Dorasamy, a campaigner at Amnesty International South Africa, told Al Jazeera that while the country had made progress in women’s representation, it had not seen the same improvement in the lives of the majority of women. Women struggle to open cases, are dismissed when reporting violence and receive little information after making complaints. Some withdraw their cases entirely because the process becomes so difficult and exhausting that they no longer see a benefit in continuing. That is not a gap in law. It is a gap in enforcement, resourcing and institutional accountability.

By contrast, the economic data from Statistics South Africa tells a story of structural exclusion that no single policy has yet addressed. The national unemployment rate stood at 32.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026. For women, it was 36.4 percent, against 29.6 percent for men. Among Black African women, the rate reached 40.5 percent. Women were also less likely to participate in the labour force at all, at 53.8 percent compared with 65.6 percent for men. Among people aged 15 to 24, 39.2 percent of young women and girls were neither employed nor in education or training, compared with 36 percent of young men and boys.

Unemployment deepens dependence on relatives or partners and makes it harder for women to support children or leave abusive relationships. In poorer and rural communities, those pressures are compounded by limited access to land, productive resources and reliable public services. The roots of those inequalities reach back to apartheid and earlier systems of racial dispossession, which denied Black South Africans access to land, capital and economic opportunity. Women faced additional restrictions through discriminatory laws and social structures. Democracy changed the political system. It did not erase decades of economic exclusion.

Sophie Williams-de Bruyn, now 88, returned to the Union Buildings on Sunday, the same site where she had marched as an 18-year-old in 1956. Her speech captured the tension at the heart of the day. She described women as prisoners in their own homes despite the democratic freedoms won after apartheid, and spoke of poverty, homelessness, a lack of clean drinking water and systemic corruption. “We fought to dismantle the yokes of systemic oppression of women as a race, class and gender,” she said. She received a standing ovation.

The commemorations also carried an international dimension. Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai attended, and Ramaphosa used the occasion to express solidarity with women and girls in Afghanistan who have been systematically excluded from education, employment and public life.

What remains unresolved, after all the speeches, is the question of institutional follow-through. The National Disaster Management Centre’s classification of gender-based violence as a national disaster now requires a response commensurate with that designation. Police recording, case management, prosecutorial capacity and social support services all fall within the mandate of accountable government departments. Whether those departments will be held to measurable outcomes, and by whom, is the question that the 70th anniversary leaves open. For further reporting on the historical significance and ongoing struggles, see https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/8/11/seventy-years-after-south-africas-womens-march-the-struggle-is-not-over.