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You Strike a Woman you Strike a Rock - Image Courtersy Inforesources.com http://inforesources.glogster.com/Womens-Day/

In the early hours of a dry, dusty and cold ninth day of August 1956, more than 20 000 South African women of all colours, hues, religious affiliations and political orientation, marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria – the administrative capital of the country, to demand what was rightfully theirs: their civil, political and human rights.  For them complete and total race and gender equality was not a dream but “an idea whose time had come.”  In those dark days of the full rage of Apartheid, that was a move so courageous, so fraught with all manner of possibilities for their own, and their families’ physical harm and banishment or exiling that it is almost impossible to imagine why they dared to do this.  But they walked, took trains and buses and taxis to make this point – which we celebrate this day, August 9^th and throughout this month as well.   Having witnessed the legalized persecution, marginalization and denigration of black Africans, and their men and boys in particular, they told the then Prime Minister, J. G. Strijdom (and indirectly to Min. Hendrik Verwoerd who was in charge of the so-called Native Affairs department who made his famous De Wildt Speech with the refrain: “Waar staan die baas?  Die baas staan op die kaffir se nek” a speech made half a kilometer from THS …to which African people responded: “ Nnandzi’ ndod’ e mnyama Verwoerd…passopa Verwoerd) in no uncertain terms and in words now known, heard and that resonate all over the world every month of August: “Wathint’ Abafazi, Wa thint’ Imbokodo, uzokufa.” (Loosely translated: Now you have struck the women; you have struck a rock…)

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