8 August 2015
The South African Communist Party (SACP) congratulates the African National Congress Women`s League (ANCWL) for holding its National Conference and electing new leadership. The SACP thanks the entire ANCWL leadership collective that has led the organisation and delivered it at the congress intact despite all the difficulties experienced on the journey. The SACP congratulates the entire newly elected leadership and wishes them well in taking forward the work to build the ANCWL and ensuring that it leaves up to its purpose!
The SACP wishes all women of our country, young and old a happy Women`s Day 2015, 9 August!!
Women have played an important role in our struggle. Our revolution, including its second, more radical phase will not be successful without women continuing to play that role and intensifying it.
Women were among the first after the establishment of the ANC in 1912 to radicalise our struggle!
In the year 1913, the year in which the notorious Native Land Act was passed, women began the fight back through passive resistance and refusal to carry passes!
Heroic leaders like Charlotte Maxeke, the first black woman graduate in South Africa who was to become the first President of the Bantu Women`s League, which became the ANCWL in 1948 played an important role. We need more progressive women and women revolutionaries like those heroes of our struggle who co-ordinated resistance struggles against colonial oppression culminating, in early 1919, in a massive march led by Maxeke and other women leaders.
By 1922, the oppressive white minority, colonial, capitalist regime was forced to agree not to extend pass laws to women, as a result of those struggles.
Throughout the 1950s women waged gallant struggles against the apartheid regime`s return to pass laws for women. They fought against other increasingly repressive laws that restricted freedom of movement and political rights.
We dip the Red banner in recognition of the heroic women who participated in and led the struggle - Dora Tamana, Bertha Mashaba, Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, Albertina Sisulu, Sophie De Bruyn, and trade unionist Frances Baard who was also involved in the drafting of the Freedom Charter.
Throughout our struggle, women played a major role, Josie Mpama, Cissie Gool, Bettie Du Toit, Ray Alexander, Ruth First, Fatima Meer, Dorothy Nyembe and countless more. Women also swelled the ranks of the people`s army uMkhonto we Sizwe, and fought gallantly in the liberation struggle.
While we have made massive progress since 1994 in the transformation of gender relations, including social delivery, our society still remains largely patriarchal. This is a result both of the pre-colonial patriarchal society which most of our people lived in and the social relations of capitalism in its historical context of colonialism and apartheid.
Under that regime, black women suffered threefold - the worst of class exploitation, gender domination and racist national oppression.
Therefore the entire struggle for gender emancipation requires the attention and activism of all of us, women and men, working as brothers and sisters in the struggle and struggling as comrades together to achieve complete social
emancipation.
But once more women have a crucial role to play. The building of a progressive women`s movement is essential. Its importance cannot be over-emphasised.
A strong ANCWL mobilising the rural poor, working class women, women workers and women in other sectors of society has a critical role to play in:
Issued by the SACP
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