Dear Campus Community
National Women's Day invites us to remember the courage of the more than 20 000 women who marched to the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956 in pursuit of justice, dignity and freedom. Their legacy belongs to our shared history, yet the realities many women continue to face today remind us that the work of building a more just and equal society is far from complete.
As a man, I would hesitate to tell women what this day should mean. Instead, I choose to listen—and I encourage our university community to do the same. Across the University of the Western Cape (UWC), women are not only advancing knowledge through their teaching, research and community engagement; they are enriching our understanding of strength through their lived experiences.
This year, I invited colleagues to share what Women's Day means to them. Their reflections are deeply personal, but they also speak to the values that have long defined UWC: courage, compassion, critical inquiry and an unwavering commitment to social justice.
One contribution that particularly moved me was that of Dr Tamlynn Roberths from the Department of Religion and Theology. In the first year of her doctoral studies, her husband was murdered in an act of gang-related violence. Widowed while raising a young daughter, she drew strength from UWC's motto, Respice Prospice—to look back in order to look forward. Rather than allowing grief to define her future, she completed her doctoral studies and now accompanies women students as they find their voices and develop the confidence to become church and community leaders.
Reflecting on her journey, Dr Roberths writes: "Even on the days when the world falls apart, hope waits patiently for us to find the courage to see it. More often than not, that courage is found within community spaces marked by trauma, suffering and fear. It is found in listening to the stories of others and in discovering that the human spirit is remarkably resilient. Holding onto hope, even without having all the answers, is what enables me to continue learning from the women I teach and work alongside."
Alongside Dr Roberths' story, Prof Tamara Shefer, from the Department of Women's & Gender Studies, reminds us that Women's Day is rooted in collective resistance and calls us to confront the intersecting injustices that continue to shape women's lives. And, Dr Thandi Gamedze, from the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, reflects on the unfinished work of liberation and the importance of solidarity in challenging every form of oppression.
Dr Tamlynn Roberths, Department of Religion and Theology
Growing up on the Cape Flats meant always being confronted by the reality of human suffering and violence, but also by a rich life of community and hospitality. I was four years old when I first learned what it meant to truly share. My parents would take my siblings and me to share evening suppers with children living beneath the Bellville Bridge. They never presented it as charity or as helping children who were "less than" us. Instead, they taught us that care, dignity and family are found in community, even amidst trauma.
Fast forward twenty-nine years, and I am now an academic at the very institution that also taught me the value of community. The University of the Western Cape's motto, Respice, Prospice—"To Look Back, To Look Forward"—has echoed throughout my life, my research and my community engagement. It stayed with me when I became a student at UWC, followed me as I completed my PhD, and continues to shape me as I raise my little girl in the very community where I grew up and where I continue to work with families confronted by community-based trauma on a daily basis.
It was during the first year of my PhD that my own understanding of trauma changed forever. My husband was murdered in an act of gang-related violence. Just two months later, my father passed away after his battle with cancer. Overnight, I found myself navigating unimaginable grief as a widow, a mother and a doctoral student. Respice, Prospice became more than a university motto. It became a reminder that while life unpredictably hands us trauma and hardship, we still have a choice in how we look back on our experiences and how we look forward with hope.
My PhD research, titled Three-generational households: A case study on the relational resources and the church as agent of socialisation amidst community-based trauma on the Cape Flats, made it possible for me not only to confront my own trauma and loss, but also to create spaces for three-generational families living on the Cape Flats who face community-based trauma every day. In many ways, I realised that I was no longer only researching trauma—I was living it alongside the communities I was journeying with.
Research is often an opportunity not only to create new knowledge but also to build relationships and affirm our shared humanity. Trauma, especially in the lives of women, often silences the voice within us that says, "I am doing this. I am achieving this." Trauma demands survival. As a new wife and mother who suddenly lost her husband during the first year of my PhD, I knew I had to keep going. Giving up would have meant abandoning dreams that I carried long before trauma and grief entered my life. It would have meant believing that hope for something better no longer existed.
Even on the days when the world falls apart, hope waits patiently for us to find the courage to see it. More often than not, that courage is found within community spaces marked by trauma, suffering and fear. It is found in listening to the stories of others and in discovering that the human spirit is remarkably resilient. Holding on to hope, even without all the answers, is what enables me to continue learning from the women I teach and work alongside.
In the Theology classroom, I have the privilege of journeying with female students who are learning to find their voices and develop confidence in preaching, even though some come from church communities where preaching and teaching are still considered the responsibility of men. Their courage continually reminds me why this work matters.
Within the Department of Religion and Theology, I have also been privileged to work alongside women theologians and scholars whose research and community engagement embody hope in different ways. I work with female colleagues in Biblical Studies who advocate for women affected by gender-based violence, female colleagues whose work contributes to conversations on decolonisation and human rights, and a colleague whose work creates meaningful spaces for women within the Islamic faith and Theology. My story may be unique to me, but at UWC it is met by the stories, passion, community work and scholarship of other women who continue to advocate for transformation, justice and hope.
Our stories are different, but they meet in a shared commitment to creating spaces where others, especially women, can flourish. Looking back has taught me to be grateful for the people and communities that shaped me. Looking forward reminds us that hope is not something we simply speak about—it is something we choose to live.
Prof Tamara Shefer, Women’s and Gender Studies
By remembering women’s collective activism against the draconian apartheid laws, as in the Women’s March against pass laws on this day in 1956, National Women’s Day honours past and present women’s struggles for gender justice and women’s rights. It also reminds us that the struggle is not over and that any victories must be carefully guarded in current times. Women and other gender and sexual minorities continue to lead a wide range of activist and other resistance activities, including mass mobilisation, online movements and artistic activism against inequalities and violence against women and other subjugated people. It is disturbing that this history and ongoing political meaning are often lost in current responses to National Women’s Day, which tends to represent the day as a consumerist-oriented moment to appreciate individual women. In South Africa, the emphasis on women’s rights and gender justice has always been viewed as intersectional with a strong appreciation of how racism, class inequalities and poverty, age hierarchies, sexual and gender diversity, and more, cut across and shape gender equality. In current times, global crises of accelerated military conflicts, climate crisis and environmental degradation are also increasingly understood through gender justice lenses: the way in which patriarchal, colonial and capitalist logics and practices, such as extractivist and violent engagements with each other, other species and the planet are deeply implicated in global crises. National Women’s Day offers us a space to acknowledge continued gender and intersecting justice challenges; to appreciate our differences as women, and people, but also our common responsibilities to challenge dominant ways of living, and to begin to imagine alternative ways of living in which power and violence are made unimaginable.
UWC is a ‘struggle university’. Women’s and Gender justice activism was always a part of the struggles on campus and beyond against apartheid. We continue to foreground scholarship that is directed at social justice. UWC scholars, both lecturers and students, are doing invaluable work to make a difference, not only focused on their individual careers.
Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) is one of the strongest departments of its kind in South Africa. We celebrated our 30th Anniversary in 2025. However, it remains important to keep our strength in the current times of recalcifying right-wing swings in which misogynistic, homophobic and queerphobic attacks are rife. Notably, Women’s and Gender Studies at UWC has been a leading force in advancing cutting-edge areas of global gender scholarship, with a particular focus on how gender justice is entangled with environmental challenges and climate crises. Prof Desiree Lewis’ critical food studies project is one angle of this work that brings an intersectional feminist lens to bear on the politics of food, interrogating social and ideological struggles over the meanings, control over, and access to food.
I have recently received a DST-NRF SARChI chair in the Blue Humanities and Gender Justice, and this work is carving a new scholarly and advocacy terrain, which is ‘thinking with water’ for gender and environmental justice. Today we face the ominous impacts of extractivist oceanic mining, overfishing, sewage spillage, industry pollution, and other invasive and toxic practices, devastating the livelihoods and well-being of humans, other species and the living oceans and beaches. This is also gendered, in that women are usually impacted more harshly and mostly excluded from decision-making, even though they may have important knowledge. The new Chair will actively pursue scholarship that generates knowledge, scholarly, activist and artistic, contributing to both university-based and public pedagogies and consciousness-raising, while promoting larger responsibility for re-imagining ways of living on what Anna Tsing calls our ‘damaged planet.’ WGS students are also doing important work investigating the intersections of gender and environmental justice. For example, Michelle Masuku, about to graduate with her PhD in WGS, applies a feminist political ecology and Indigenous Knowledge Systems lens to study how urban women in Harare are farming on marginal land, such as roadsides, riverbanks and vacant plots, as a way of surviving and caring for their families. Michelle elaborates: “I call this “fugitive agricultural praxis” because these practices are often quiet and overlooked, but they are also powerful acts of resistance against environmental precarity and the gendered ways that access to land and resources is controlled. Women are reclaiming space and dignity through the soil, even when the system isn't built for them to do this.”
We are currently facing global polycrises of heightened military conflict, genocides, food and water insecurity, environmental degradation and climate crisis. The challenges we face have much to do with centuries of extractivist and exploitative practices that characterise our global capitalist world, against many humans, other species and the planet itself. A critical gendered lens, which can flag the way in which gender inequalities and patriarchy, entangled with the logics of coloniality and capital, are implicated in these crises, is more imperative than ever. Remembering the struggles of women against a violent system of apartheid a few decades ago sharpens our recognition that the struggle continues. A key part of this is to challenge dominant (masculinist) ways of living that have privileged individuality, control, competition, extraction, ‘development’ while suppressing care, relationality and shared responsibility. We need to guard against attacks on what we have gained while also expanding gender justice efforts and solidarities to work across diverse disciplines, sectors, modalities, and justice struggles.
Dr Thandi Gamedze, Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice
Women's Day matters because it reminds us that the struggle for liberation is unfinished. Many women in South Africa continue to experience violence, economic inequality, and exclusion shaped by the enduring legacies of apartheid, colonialism, and patriarchy. It also reminds us that liberation must always be intersectional. The 1956 Women's March challenged both gender oppression as well as the pass laws that upheld the colonial and apartheid racial capitalism. That legacy calls us to recognise how different forms of power intersect and to confront systems of domination wherever we may find them. Liberation remains possible only through a shared commitment to justice for all.
UWC has historically been known as the intellectual home of the left and is fundamentally shaped by a commitment to the pursuit of justice. Importantly, as the conversation initiated by the Rector last year surfaced, to truly embody justice, the idea of ‘the left’ must be expansive and committed to rejecting all structures that dehumanise and oppress – however they manifest across time and space. This aligns with the intersectional orientation of the Women’s March described above, and invites us as a university community into a rejection of classism and racism, as well as patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, and any other ideologies that dehumanise.
At the Desmond Tutu Centre, we understand justice as requiring both the naming and rejection of oppressive and dehumanising systems, and the creation of humanising alternatives, built through movements and relationships of solidarity and subversive imagination. Our work explores how religion has been appropriated to legitimise injustice and, conversely, has inspired movements of resistance, liberation, and hope. Struggles for gender justice are central to this. Our work consistently addresses this, highlighting women’s contributions that have historically been marginalised or written out of history, naming and combating patriarchy within religious structures and traditions, and building relationships of solidarity with women across contexts – while continuing to pay attention to the intersectionality within all of this.
This Women's Day, may we remember that liberation – relating to gender, sexuality, race, class, etc. – is not something that was completed in 1994, but that we must continue to struggle for and build together. And may we continue the unfinished work of liberation in solidarity with all groups bearing the brunt of structures of oppression, refusing every form of dehumanisation wherever it may show up – even within ourselves – so that we can create a world in which everyone can flourish.
I hope these reflections encourage us all to pause, to listen with humility and to recognise that the pursuit of gender justice is not only a woman's responsibility, but a shared human one.
Professor Robert Balfour
Rector and Vice-Chancellor
