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13 August, 2007
In South Africa last week on 9 August, people celebrated National Women’s Day in commemoration of the brave women one and two generations ago who first stood up against the racially-dividing Pass Laws of the apartheid government.
Men and women gathered at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, site of an August 1956 march by 20,000 women in protest of the Pass Laws that were enacted on 9 August 1956. In Cape Town last week, 700 women and children marched and demanded that the government immediately implement the Domestic Violence Act. The march to government buildings there was against the abuse and rape of women and children.
And across South Africa, unions, civil society organisations, and other groups used the 9 August holiday to urge more governmental action on HIV/AIDS-related work and treatment centres. Women are the worst affected by the scourge of the HIV virus.
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) issued a statement commemorating both the brave women of the anti-pass struggles, and the brave miners who stood up to white bosses in the Great Mining Strike of 1987.
“We salute the heroes and heroines of these struggles and call on employers to improve the welfare of women and workers in general as a tribute,” stated NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni. “The good wage agreements we enter into this year are a tribute to the fallen heroes and heroines of these struggles.
The anti-pass protests and deaths from those protests had a galvanizing effect against the control-minded apartheid government of the late 1950s and 1960s. The Pass Laws prevented the free movement of black people. The laws defined the very essence of oppression and racism then in South African apartheid life. White citizens, although required to have identity documents, were not required to carry them. Black South Africans had to carry passes.
The Afrikaners called it bewysboek (Book of Proof). Blacks called it dompas (stupid pass). The laws gave the police the opportunity to detain any black African who was unemployed. And since statutes said that “pass bearers” could not be officially classified as employees, blacks saw further discrimination in terms of workplace conditions and trade union rights.
On 21 March 1960, an anti-pass protest was met by the ruthlessness of police in the township of Sharpville, south of Johannesburg. Police fired on demonstrators, killing 69 of them – many shot in the back as they were retreating – and wounded 178 others. Many of the organisers were arrested.
Considered the leader of South Africa’s anti-pass movement was Margaret Gazo, the woman with the idea for the 20,000-person march in August 1956. She died in 1974, but spent five years in prison due to her activism. The Pass Laws were repealed in 1987, with some aspects of the statutes repealed earlier.
The ICEM salutes South African working men and women of today for honouring the groundbreaking achievements of women of the anti-pass movement, and echoes NUM’s Baleni in paying tribute to these pioneers of the early anti-apartheid era.