70 years after South Africa’s women protested apartheid, many say their fight for freedom isn’t finished
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
Twenty thousand women walked to Pretoria in 1956 to protest a pass law, and the government of the day did what governments often do when confronted with an inconvenient truth: it ignored them for decades. That march deserves the anniversary it's getting. Apartheid was an evil system, full stop, and the women who organized that protest took real risks doing it.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
South Africa commemorates on Sunday 70 years since the Women’s March of 1956, when around 20,000 women of all races marched to the administrative capital, Pretoria, to protest apartheid laws forcing Black women to carry passes that restricted their movement.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Twenty thousand women walked to Pretoria in 1956 to protest a pass law, and the government of the day did what governments often do when confronted with an inconvenient truth: it ignored them for decades. That march deserves the anniversary it's getting. Apartheid was an evil system, full stop, and the women who organized that protest took real risks doing it. There's no ambiguity there, and we're not going to pretend otherwise just because this is a foreign story.
But "many say their fight for freedom isn't finished" is doing a lot of work in that headline, and it's worth asking what that actually means in 2024 South Africa. The country has had Black-majority rule for thirty years now. The ANC has governed almost that entire time. If the promise of that 1956 march remains unfulfilled, the honest question is why the party that inherited the moral authority of that struggle hasn't delivered on it, not whether some new external villain is to blame.
That's the pattern we keep seeing in coverage like this. A genuinely admirable historical moment gets invoked, and the framing quietly slides from "here's what was overcome" to "here's what's still owed," without much scrutiny of the governance record in between. South Africa has real, current problems: rolling blackouts, unemployment near 30 percent, crime rates that terrify people who can afford to leave. Those aren't apartheid's ghosts. They're policy outcomes from the last three decades, and the women who marched in 1956 deserve better than having their legacy used to paper over that.
Honor the anniversary. Just don't let it substitute for accountability now.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.