For 70 years, South Africans have drawn strength from the enduring phrase, “Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo” — you strike a woman, you strike a rock.
The slogan has become a symbol of courage, resilience and collective resistance.
It honours about 20,000 women who marched to the Union Buildings on August 9 1956, demanding dignity, justice and freedom.
Each year in August, we repeat those words with pride.
Yet, as we mark the 70th anniversary of that historic march, I find myself lingering over their meaning within our teaching and learning spaces today.
If abafazi speaks to women, who do we understand women to be in contemporary SA?
Do we imagine women in their full diversity, across sexuality, gender identity, culture, race, disability and lived experience?
Or do we continue, perhaps unintentionally, to centre certain experiences while others remain peripheral?
And if imbokodo symbolises strength, resilience and an unshakable foundation, what does it mean to ask women to be the rock while some are still uncertain whether they truly belong in the institutions that shape our nation’s future?
Seventy is more than a chronological marker.
Across many traditions, including the biblical tradition, it symbolises a season of completion, reflection, wisdom and renewal.
It marks the closing of one chapter while inviting the beginning of another.
As SA commemorates 70 years since the historic Women’s March, perhaps this milestone calls us to do more than celebrate.
Perhaps it invites us to pause, reflect honestly on what has been achieved, acknowledge what remains unfinished, and imagine a deeper understanding of empowerment for the generations that will inherit our teaching and learning spaces.
As we commemorate 70 years since the Women’s March under the theme “Empowered Women Empower the Nation,” I find myself pausing over the word empowerment.
It is a word that has become so familiar that we seldom stop to examine it, yet one that is woven through our policies, institutional strategies, transformation agendas, keynote addresses, research and teaching.
It has become part of the everyday language we use to speak about women and gender justice.
Has familiarity with the word empowerment replaced reflection?
After 70 years, I am compelled to ask whether teaching and learning spaces have truly interrogated its meaning with the depth and seriousness it deserves.
Have South African universities created environments where all women are empowered, or have some women remained at the margins of institutional life?
If empowerment is indeed central to nation-building, then whose empowerment continues to remain invisible, and why?
When I reflect on empowerment, I see it, on the one hand, as affirmation — as the language of inclusion, visibility and opportunity.
On the other hand, I see power dynamics — subtle institutional hierarchies that quietly determine whose voices are heard most clearly, whose knowledge is legitimised, whose identities are comfortable and whose presence remains conditional.
There is a thin, often invisible line between empowerment and the performance of empowerment, and it is along that line that women in their diversity often find themselves negotiating space rather than inhabiting it fully.
Institutions do not simply empower women, they structure power.
They create cultures that either enable women to flourish or subtly require them to adapt.
A university may open its doors wide, appoint women to leadership and adopt progressive policies.
But if certain women must still self-censor, self-edit or shrink aspects of their identity to navigate institutional life, then empowerment remains uneven.
In my work in sexualities, genders and queer studies, I encounter lived realities that statistics alone can never fully capture.
Gender non-conforming students often describe feeling safer concealing their identities than expressing them openly.
Academics who identify as queer may be protected by institutional policy yet still find themselves negotiating daily recognition and legitimacy in subtle but exhausting ways.
Gender-diverse women frequently remain peripheral within curricula and research agendas — included in principle, but marginal in practice.
These experiences I have noted, reveal the distance between formal inclusion and lived empowerment.
They show how equality can be declared, counted and recorded, yet still feel distant in everyday life.
It may exist in policy documents and annual reports, while belonging remains tentative and conditional.
Women’s Month should never be confined to celebration alone. It must also be a moment of institutional introspection.
In such teaching and learning spaces, empowerment becomes uneven — spoken confidently in language but experienced cautiously in reality.
For this reason, Women’s Month should never be confined to celebration alone.
It must also be a moment of institutional introspection.
Genuine inclusion requires more than compliance with policy frameworks.
It requires transformation and gender equity structures that are adequately resourced and empowered to shape institutional culture proactively rather than intervening only after harm has occurred.
Without doubt, remarkable progress over the past three decades is evident.
Gender-responsive policies, transformation and equity offices, gender studies programmes, stronger responses to gender-based violence, LGBTQIA+ support initiatives, research chairs and increased representation of women in leadership all reflect meaningful institutional change.
These achievements are not insignificant.
They reflect sustained activism, scholarship and institutional effort; above all, they matter.
However, the existence of these structures does not automatically produce cultures of inclusion; neither does representation create belonging nor fully reflect the diversity of women’s lived realities.
The women who marched in 1956 did not march for token visibility.
They marched for dignity so that future generations would not have to defend their humanity to participate fully in public life.
The responsibility of today’s teaching and learning spaces is not merely to commemorate that march, but to empower women in their diversity and cultivate a genuine sense of belonging.
For me, belonging has become the measure that matters most if women are to be empowered and, in turn, if the nation is to be empowered.
A rock stands because it has a foundation.
Likewise, empowerment cannot stand without belonging.
We cannot celebrate women as imbokodo while expecting some to carry the additional burden of invisibility or conditional acceptance.
We cannot celebrate women as imbokodo while expecting some to carry the additional burden of invisibility or conditional acceptance.
Belonging asks whether women in their diversity can lead without shrinking parts of themselves and whether transformation is embedded in everyday practice rather than invoked primarily during commemorative months.
Seventy years is a long time. It is long enough to celebrate progress.
It is also long enough to admit that the work of transformation is unfinished.
The next 70 years require us to ask a different question.
Instead of asking how many women in their diversity are present, perhaps the question should be which women still feel that they do not belong.
Equality may have opened the doors in teaching and learning spaces, but empowerment requires transforming what happens once those doors are crossed — the hierarchies that are either sustained or dismantled, and how power is exercised.
Belonging must become the lens through which progress is assessed, because true transformation is measured not only by access, but by whether every woman can inhabit these spaces fully and without compromise.
It is only under those conditions that the promise embedded in the 2026 theme, “Empowered Women Empower the Nation,” can move beyond symbolism and become lived reality.
Dr Bellita Banda Chitsamatanga, DSI-NRF SARChl in sexualities, genders and queer studies, University of Fort Hare
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