Helen Joseph's Tribute to the 70th Anniversary of the Women's March

In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Women's March, the author addresses the memory of Helen Joseph, whose resilience continues to inspire. Seventy years have passed since she and twenty thousand women of all races marched to the Union Buildings. The author notes that the words that helped make her immortal continue to resonate across the country: 'Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo!' (Strike the woman, strike the rock).

These words, in the author's opinion, are not merely a slogan for the day of remembrance, but a living command and a sound of defiance that arose on the amphitheater in Pretoria in 1956 and continues to demand courage from every generation unwilling to bow their heads.

Women's Day: Lessons in Resistance

The author shares how he first understood the true meaning of these words through Helen, 'Mama Helen.' Sitting at her modest home at 35 Fanny Avenue in Norwood, he received the story of the struggle for liberation as a living truth. Helen did not give lectures; she spoke with the quiet authority of someone who had lived every word she uttered.

She taught him that the fight against apartheid was not just about laws, passes, and identity documents, but about the complete rejection of a system built on racial domination and economic plunder. The author internalized that compromise with apartheid, racism, or those who sell the struggle for a seat at the oppressors' table is impossible. His own life served as the clearest proof of this principle.

Thanks to her, the author met Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Mama Albertina Sisulu, and Mama Sophie de Bruyn. These names became alive for him through Helen, who explained how the Great Women's March of 1956 was organized and what it truly meant. She spoke of the meticulous planning and discipline required to move thousands of women in small groups so that authorities could not easily stop them, as well as the petitions carried by ordinary women who decided enough was enough.

The author saw that the march was the result of deep organization, courage, and political clarity, not a spontaneous outburst. Through her, he grasped the living significance of the Freedom Charter. Helen was present at its launch at the Congress of the People in Kliptown on June 26, 1955, and read the clause: 'The people shall have the right to live in homes, with security and comfort.' These words still demand fulfillment and remain an unpaid debt.

Madiba's Miracles: Memory and Defiance

For many long years, when the ANC and other liberation movements were banned, Helen kept alive the memory of those in exile, in prison, and all political prisoners. She did not allow the regime to erase them from the minds of those who remained in the country. Every Christmas, when she was not under house arrest, friends and family of political prisoners gathered at 35 Fanny Avenue.

Exactly at noon, she would raise a glass of champagne and say simple but firm words: 'To our absent friends.' And every glass responded. This ritual was a solemn, almost sacred act of political memory and defiance. Even when the regime restricted her and banned visitors, she appeared at the garden gate at this sacred time, holding a glass while comrades stood across the road at a legal distance, raising their fists in greeting to black power, raising glasses in solidarity, and shouting 'Amandla!'

Even the walls of Robben Island knew about this ritual. Men and women imprisoned in those cells understood that they had not been forgotten. She took care of it. The author recalls one morning when he came to her home and found her, already in her eighties, sweeping shards of glass and wood splinters from the floor after shots had been fired at her windows that night. She spent dark hours under the bed, sheltering from the gunfire, but when he entered, the fire was still burning in her eyes. 'These bastards will never break me,' she said. And they never could. Attacks repeated: stones in windows, phone threats, paint thrown on cars, nighttime shootings, a bomb placed at her front entrance. She survived it all. Her body aged, but her spirit did not.

Even in the year of her death in 1992, she was fiercely critical of the compromises reached in the early years of negotiations after the ANC ban was lifted. Due to her clear political vision, she already saw the unacceptable direction and dangerous compromises these early talks were taking. As was characteristic of her, she spoke out and warned even at an early stage, right up until her last breath on her deathbed. She shared the deep concern of Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Comrade Chris Hani that too much was being given away. She saw the danger in an agreement that would leave the fundamental economic structures of apartheid largely untouched. She understood that without political rights, most people would remain trapped in poverty and landlessness. She refused to celebrate prematurely, insisting on the principle when others were already preparing to lower the standard of what the struggle demanded.

Her support for Mama Winnie never wavered. In lonely years when she had to raise Zindi and Zenani alone while Nelson Mandela was in prison, she was one of those who stood by her, helping to care for the girls. She opened her home and her heart. Despite every campaign of slander and propaganda directed against her, she remained her defender, even when it cost her friendship and political comfort. She supported her 100% without reservation. She never compromised. She understood the special cruelty aimed at women who refuse to break, and she stood by her without calculation.

She recorded the truth in books that still speak. If 'This Be Treason' is her dramatic narrative of the Treason Trial, the longest political trial in South African history, and 'Tomorrow's Sun' documents her long journey of thousands of miles to describe the lives of those exiled to remote rural areas for resisting apartheid and pass laws, then her beautiful autobiography 'Side by Side' takes its name directly from the concluding words of the Freedom Charter: 'We shall strive for these freedoms, hand in hand, throughout our lives until we achieve our freedom.' Through this book, the golden thread of indestructibility runs from the first to the last page. It is not sentimental memoirs; it is a political testimony, recording a life lived in continuous opposition to racial domination and in continuous solidarity with those who suffered from it.

On December 25, 1992, exactly at noon—the hour she always dedicated to her absent friends in prison and in exile—she left us. The author was by her bedside in what was then called J.G. Stridt Hospital. It was one of the loneliest, saddest, and most heartbreaking moments of his life. The coincidence of the timing was almost unbearable. The woman who annually kept the memory of the prisoners alive at this exact time was now breathing her last breath at the same time. This hospital is now named after her: Helen Joseph Hospital. Even in death, the regime's name was erased, and her name rose in its place. There is a profound justice in this renaming. The person whose name the hospital bore was the prime minister to whom the women of 1956 petitioned. History, in a sense, answered.

Not a single day in his political life passes without the influence of her mentorship. When pressure arises to soften demands, to make concessions, or to sell a piece of a dream for temporary advantage, he asks himself: what would Mama Helen do? The answer is always the same: no compromises. No capitulation. No polite acceptance of half-measures that leave the structures of inequality untouched. The struggle continues until fundamental economic transformation is achieved, which they fought for. Land. Wealth. Dignity. Homes, security, and comfort for all. These are not optional extras; they are the unfinished business of the Freedom Charter and the generation that marched in 1956.

Today, seventy years after the Women's March, he greets her with the same cry that rose from the Union Buildings amphitheater. He greets the rock that refused to crack. He greets the woman who taught him that principle is not a luxury, but a necessity. He greets the mentor who shaped his political understanding in the crucible of real resistance, not in the comfort of theory. 'Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo!'

She taught him that a woman who refuses to surrender is like a rock against which every wave of oppression must break. He remains her student. The fire she lit still burns. It burns in the refusal to accept cosmetic changes while the essence of injustice remains the same. It burns in the demand that the Freedom Charter not be reduced to a historical curiosity, but viewed as a living program. It burns in the memory of every glass raised for absent friends. It burns in the knowledge that the struggle is not over simply because formal political power has changed.

The debt to Mama Helen cannot be repaid with words. It can only be repaid with constant fidelity to the principles she embodied: no compromise with racism, no compromise with those who sell the struggle. Full commitment to radical economic transformation, which can make freedom real for the majority of his people. The fire she lit still burns. Amandla!