Women’s actions were powerful
Strijdom, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed Women’s March rally cry
WOMEN in South Africa have a long history of protesting against injustice, often with great courage against overwhelming odds.
Protests occurred in rural as well as urban areas – and sometimes they took surprising turns, as surprising sometimes as the people who drove them.
In the fight against pass laws, it was women too who took on the might of white authorities in some of the most conservative, authoritarian parts of the country.
In the second decade of the 1900s, for instance, the Orange Free State was rocked by women protesting against the pass laws. The more the authorities cracked the whip, the more they heightened their protests.
In May 1913, police reported an increase in the number of arrests for pass law “violations”, mainly in Bloemfontein, but also in towns such as Winburg and Jagersfontein.
Women in rural areas have often been portrayed as downtrodden and helpless, but if this were true, there were notable exceptions…
In 1922, for example, in tiny Herschel in the Eastern Cape, rural women started a boycott of white shopkeepers, which they rigidly policed and enforced.
They had embarked on the boycott to force the shopkeepers to stop a hated practice of buying maize and vegetables from local producers at low prices and then selling to local communities later (especially in times of shortages) at high prices.
The Northern Post, a newspaper based in Aliwal North, initially described the action of the women as “silly”, but later, as the boycott bit deeper, the correspondent warned of impending trouble, and expressed surprise that the main strikers were women.
But the most remembered – and revered – political action of all was the march on August 9, 1956 to the Union buildings in Pretoria by 20 000 women of all colours and from all parts of South Africa to protest against the pass laws.
The spreading of the message of the march was a combined effort by, among others, the ANC Women’s League, the Federation of South African Women, the Coloured People’s Congress and the Congress of Democrats. And among the women to work on the logistics of a major undertaking – made even more difficult by the constant harassment of the security police – were Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Dora Tamani and Ray Alexander.
The march by so many thousands singing, “Now you have touched the women, Strijdom, you have struck a rock (you have dislodged a boulder!), you will be crushed”, was deemed a success, even though it did not lead to a change of heart by the National Party administration of JG Strijdom.