Discussed the joy of our national women’s soccer team winning the AFCON Cup; and being financially rewarded for their stellar performance.
We also watched a 12- year girl in the USA stand in a government building and speak up about horrifying consequences of the overturning of Roe v Wade for girls like just her.
We spoke about today’s court victory for TERFs – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists – a topic that has been fiercely debated over our multi-generational family dinner table.
The world is – quite literally – on fire all around us.
I am no longer sure if the ‘future is female’.
And I have felt at a loss as how to start the conversation on women and gender parity as we start Women’s Month 2022 in South Africa.
It is a month that celebrates the women of our nation – their activism, their sense of justice, their solidarity. Their belief in their own agency and in their collective power. Their belief that women’s voices and movements are at the heart of every fight for human rights. That if you ‘strike a woman, you strike a rock’. That women are the mothers and the mainstay of our homes, communities, nations. That as women rise, that the world changes in every way, for the better. That we lift as we rise – economically, politically and socially.
Although I feel the fractures and the fear of these times; I hold alongside this a sense of the importance of women in a future that is uncertainly unfolding. There is much hope in that. And impatience.
As we amplify voices and explore a wide range of writing and topics this Woman’s Month. I am certain of this –
Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokotho
