Umsebenzi Online Volume 24, Number 5, 28 August 2025
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Volume 24, Number 5, 28 August 2025 |
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Red AlertPeople’s Red Caravan and gender struggles as part of the socialist struggle |
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WOMEN’S MONTH
People’s Red Caravan and gender struggles as part of the socialist struggle
Jenny Schreiner
Imagine you are a pregnant woman in a rural village and your waters break. You have to find your way to the 24-hour clinic over terribly ravaged roads that even make walking difficult, and local cars suffer the consequences with broken shock absorbers.
You arrive in the clinic, even more uncomfortable after the rough journey. You are taken to the labour ward. The labour pains come in waves, but so does the sound of patients and nurses in the passage just metres away from the bed that you lie on; and so does the flimsy curtain that billows as people rush down the passage.
It is just this thin blue material that separates the swell of your pain and emotions as you breathe deeply and push this new life out into the world, from the nurses station just across the way. This, until recently, was the experience of black rural working-class mothers in Motlhabe and the surrounding villages in Moruleng. The People’s Red Caravan has changed this by mobilising a local artisan to put in a sliding door purchased through the Party.
The People’s Red Caravan (PRC) has changed this by mobilising a local artisan to put in a sliding door purchased through the Party. The PRC aims to build self-reliance in our communities, to empower community members to feel the power they have to change their lives for the better, to bring equality and respect into the lives of girls and women in the community, one step at a time.
Cde Chris Hani said that “Socialism is not about big concepts and heavy theory. Socialism is about decent shelter for those who are homeless. It is about water for those who have no safe drinking water. It is about healthcare; it is about a life of dignity for the old. It is about overcoming the huge divide between urban and rural areas. It is about a decent education for all our people. Socialism is about rolling back the tyranny of the market. As long as the economy is dominated by an unelected, privileged few, the case for socialism will exist.”
Socialism is about ensuring that people have land to grow and harvest food, enough to feed themselves and sell to others and generate household income. Socialism is about the community taking responsibility for safety of all people, so that no brother can beat up his sister because he doesn’t like the support that she is giving to a community development programme as we recently experienced in Matibidi.
If the process of transformation of social relations is to build a social system without exploitation and a gender equal society, the struggle must prioritise solutions to what we have identified as six key causes of gender inequality. In our PRC programme, which is the new organising strategy of the SACP, the way in which we aim to re-empower the masses to shape their own destiny and build an alternative to the neoliberal exploitation that has bedevilled our democracy, the Party with the community must begin to address the causes of women’s oppression and patriarchy.
- Working class women, with black working class women more so, are marginalised, paid less and often are in more precarious jobs in productive work, whether in the private sector, public sector, socialised sector, informal sector or domestic sectors. Young women have been the backbone of the collective of workers on the communal farms in the PRC villages.
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- Working-class women and girls do not get universal access to support for reproductive rights, and support for birth control, for pregnancy, for birth and maternal rights. The PRC has worked to improve the infrastructure of local clinics, to set up community health committees and to bring health workers into the community to enhance health knowledge and access, and to ensure sanitary dignity is improved for girls and women.
- Women, and more so, working-class women, are not enabled to participate equally in society, in the institutions of political life, such as in legislatures and political parties, the judiciary, in the administration, and social institutions, like schools, universities, sporting and cultural institutions. The community meetings, the cooperatives that have been established, the sports tournaments that have been organised, have seen active participation of local women, in addition to a strong presence of women Red Brigades assisting in the PRC activation week.
- Women are not educated, trained and empowered to be independent, to express their views without fear and consequences, to have the skills to be self-reliant, and to control their own destiny and decisions. The PRC has improved school infrastructure, supported teachers and aimed to provide learner support, particularly to matrics, and to invite institutions of higher learning and training to bring their campuses and skills centres into the community. This vastly improves the chances of girls and young women having access to education and training,
- Women and girls do not experience full democracy and equality in the family, with an entrenched exploitative and unequal gender division of labour within it, where the family is considered a “private matter” where any behaviour can be tolerated. This is strongly influenced by cultural values and ideology. The PRC has not directly engaged on this aspect, but empowering women on communal farms, in culture and sport, and in community meetings will also assist women to see their role in the family differently over time.
- Girls and women, and particularly black working-class women, are not ensured safety in their homes, in their places of learning, in their workplaces, in their places of sports, culture and entertainment, and in their community, which is often exacerbated for people who have a non-heteronormative choice of gender identity and sexual orientation. The PRC has brought a specific focus on GBV in the communities, along with ensuring that community police forums are more effective, and that street or community lighting is improved.
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The life of the women in Motlhabe and in Matibidi villages cannot be said to be the same as before the PRCcame into the area, but their lives are still far from what they are entitled to expect in a socialist future. It is just a small beginning, and as we learn from these two activation weeks, we will certainly be able to change women’s lives in the coming activation weeks more intensely.
Without socialism, women and gender diverse people will never achieve social emancipation, equality and full opportunity to reach their full human potential. As Marx and many Communists since then have said, “Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.”
Without women, there will be no socialist revolution. As Communists, we all believe this and we struggle for its realisation. We assert that capitalism cannot achieve gender equality for all.
As part of working to end the system of capitalist exploitation and establishing a socialist society, through the national democratic revolution, the Party is committed to: “Eradicate patriarchal relations, and weaken and ultimately destroy the economic, political and social power of the capitalist class through struggle for working class hegemony over society, in particular the ownership and control of the economy and the achievement of a united state of people’s power.
In this state, working class interests will be dominant and the economic conditions will be created which make it possible to move towards social emancipation and, eventually, the total abolition of the exploitation of one person by another in both public and private spheres of life; to organise, educate, and advance women within the working class, the poor and rural communities in pursuit of the aims of the SACP; to raise the consciousness of the working class and its allies around the integral and oppressive nature of patriarchal gender relations,” (SACP Constitution) while also strengthening the revolutionary alliance of all classes and strata whose interests are served by the NDR, and to encourage an ongoing national and international dialogue with all organisations committed to peace, transformation of gender relations, non-racialism, democracy and the preservation of our environment.
National oppression, class exploitation and patriarchy have been inseparably intertwined in South African society. The transformation of social class relations underpins the ability of a progressive state and society to secure the social emancipation of women. Capitalist society not only marginalises women in the workplace and economy but also expects working-class women to bear the brunt of social reproduction and asserts the system of patriarchy, including its ideology and cultural practices, to justify and rationalise the marginalisation of women in society, to enable profit maximisation.
Now is the time for us to create a strong socialist alternative, to provide the masses with a solution to the crisis of working class representation in local government and then in provincial and national legislatures, to mobilise a strong socialist movement of the workers and the poor, with black working class women being the backbone of the activism to build a society based on people’s power, on respect for all people, and on equality in access, in benefit, and in contribution to the economy, to society as a whole.
Cde Jenny Schreiner is a SACP Central Committee and Politburo member and a former MP, Director General, MK combatant and political prisoner
From the Women ’s March to the People ’s Red Caravan: reclaiming the spirit of revolutionary struggle
Reneva Fourie
On 9 August, we honour a day carved into the bedrock of South Africa ’s revolutionary history: the 1956 march of nearly 20 000 defiant women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to resist the apartheid regime ’s dehumanising pass laws. Their audacity was a political thunderclap in a society that condescendingly told women to know their place. Their place, as they declared with every step, was at the forefront of the struggle.
Nearly seventy years later, in 2025, that same spirit of mass mobilisation and transformative action found expression in the South African Communist Party ’s People ’s Red Caravan, launched in Bonajala, North West Province, on 2 June and carried into Matibidi Village, Mpumalanga, on 27 July. Like the women of 1956, the Caravan declared that liberation is not symbolic; it must be lived through collective organisation, grassroots development, and direct confrontation with the conditions of oppression.
To commemorate this day is not merely to look back in nostalgia. It is to confront the brutal legacies of apartheid ’s intertwined systems of class, race and gender oppression, which used pass laws not only to police Black movement, but to control and fragment families, criminalise survival, and entrench super-exploitation.
It is also to celebrate the foresight and political sophistication of the women who organised a mass march that was non-racial in character, disciplined in action and revolutionary in intent. They faced down a heavily militarised state not with weapons, but with mass power, unity and strategy. They marched knowing full well that arrests, surveillance and police violence were the price of dissent, but also knowing that their silence was betrayal. They didn ’t march because they wanted to be recognised as ‘special ’ , but to claim their full humanity and collective power.
The slogan that emerged from that moment, “you strike a woman, you strike a rock,” was not a metaphor. It was a warning. It told the apartheid state that its assumption that women were weak and non-factors would be its mistake. It also reminded the liberation movement that women would not wait to be led. It announced to the world that women were not just auxiliary participants in the struggle; they were its backbone, its brain and its fire.
The 1956 march did not isolate gender from class and national liberation. On the contrary, it exposed their inseparability. Women were not only resisting racist legislation; they were asserting a comprehensive politics of liberation grounded in the lived experiences of the most oppressed.
They were saying: our oppression is intersectional, and so our liberation must be too. These were not demands for inclusion in a male-dominated struggle. They were demands for the total transformation of society – economic, political and cultural – to end patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy in all their forms.
Yet today, we must confront the sobering truth that the radical spirit of 9 August has been largely defanged. What should be a rallying cry for the ongoing struggle has been sanitised and commodified. In many spaces, National Women ’s Day is reduced to a saccharine celebration that echoes the commercialised sentimentality of Mother ’s Day.
There are brunches, flowers, and praise songs about how “strong” women are, but little space for revolutionary critique or action that fundamentally addresses women ’s empowerment. This depoliticisation is not accidental. It is a deliberate erasure that serves the interests of patriarchy and capital. When the day is emptied of its radical content, it no longer poses a threat to power.
To ‘celebrate ’ women while ignoring the structures that oppress them is a form of violence. It allows a neoliberal state and capitalist system to posture as pro-women while continuing to brutalise women economically, socially and physically.
The feminisation of poverty remains an undeniable reality in post-apartheid South Africa. The faces of unemployment, landlessness and precarious labour are overwhelmingly Black and female. The burden of unpaid reproductive labour continues to fall on women ’s shoulders, allowing the economy to function while offering no recognition or compensation. Gender-based violence rages unchecked, with femicide rates that resemble war zones. And in the very organisations meant to carry forward liberation, women are often sidelined, tokenised or subjected to countless abuse.
Patriarchy is not just a cultural problem. It is a political system embedded in the very fabric of capitalism. It is not enough to speak of empowerment without redistribution. It is not enough to promote women ’s leadership if we do not dismantle the patriarchal relations in homes, unions, political parties and the workplace. It is not enough to have progressive laws on paper while austerity budgets slash services that women rely on to survive.
We must reject the liberal feminism that speaks of choice while leaving working-class women with none. We must reject the depoliticised feminism of corporate boardrooms that celebrates a few women breaking the glass ceiling while the vast majority are trapped below in poverty.
The liberation of women is not an optional add-on to the national democratic revolution. It is an integral part of it. No socialist project can succeed if it does not centre the demands of women. Any revolution that defers women ’s emancipation is a revolution betrayed.
We must build a feminism that is anti-capitalist, anti-racist and unapologetically militant. One that does not beg for inclusion in oppressive systems, but that seeks to tear them down and build anew. One that recognises that Black working-class women are not victims to be saved, but agents of transformation who carry forward the most advanced and necessary critiques of our current political and economic order.
Reclaiming National Women ’s Day requires more than words. It requires us to rebuild a militant women ’s movement rooted in mass organising, socialist politics and revolutionary internationalism. It means supporting women ’s self-organisation at the grassroots, taking up campaigns against gendered violence and economic inequality, and fighting for the socialisation of care work.
It means confronting patriarchy within our own movements with the same fury that we direct at the state. It means raising the political consciousness of comrades to see the struggle for women ’s liberation not as secondary, but as foundational. The People ’s Red Caravan models a feminism grounded not solely in rhetoric, but in concrete solidarity, food sovereignty, community care, and collective upliftment. In a world where National Women ’s Day too often slides into sanitised niceties, the Caravan insists that real liberation is enacted with hands as well as voices, through fixing clinics, growing food, building infrastructure, organising, and doing for the oppressed, by the oppressed.
The women of 1956 did not march to be remembered with empty tributes. They marched to overthrow a system. We owe them more than nostalgia. We owe them a struggle. We owe them a movement that is unafraid to name the enemy, whether it wears the uniform of apartheid or the suit of neoliberalism. We owe them a politics that sees women not just as symbols, but as comrades, leaders, and revolutionaries in the battle for a truly free South Africa.
Let this 9 August not be another celebration of tokenism, but a recommitment to feminist, socialist militancy. The rock has not been broken. Let us strike again: harder, louder, and together.
Cde Reneva Fourie is a member of the Central Committee and Politburo and Secretary for Gender
The South African electricity price crisis – a Marxist Feminist perspective on women’s struggles in the context of the People’s Red Caravan Campaign
Aviwe Rapelang Mohapi
The South African Communist Party’s (SACP) People’s Red Caravan Campaign is a clarion call for revolutionary change, mobilising communities to confront the injustices of South Africa’s capitalist system. This campaign marks a major step in the SACP’s commitment to grassroots development and deepening the Party’s ties with communities. The Red Caravan will serve as a dynamic platform for mobilising the working class, advancing local democratic power, and promoting socialist values through practical, community-based action.
At the heart of this struggle lies the electricity price crisis, a stark manifestation of neoliberal mismanagement and capitalist exploitation that disproportionately burdens working-class women. From a Marxist feminist lens, this crisis is not merely an economic issue but a gendered one, rooted in the commodification of a basic human need i.e. electricity. As we commemorate Women’s Month and advance the People’s Red Caravan Campaign, we must centre women’s struggles in our fight for a socialist future, where energy justice is a cornerstone of liberation.
The Capitalist Roots of the Electricity Crisis
The People’s Red Caravan Campaign seeks to expose and dismantle the capitalist structures that perpetuate inequality, and South Africa’s electricity crisis is a prime example. Driven by decades of neoliberal policies, the state-owned utility Eskom has been crippled by mismanagement, corruption and a profit-driven ethos. Since the end of apartheid, government failures to invest in infrastructure, compounded by the state capture era, have left Eskom financially strained, forcing consumers to bear the burden through relentless tariff hikes. Between 2007 and 2025, electricity prices have surged by over 400% in real terms, outpacing inflation and wage growth.
This crisis reflects the core of capitalist exploitation, where essential services are commodified, and the working class subsidises the failures of the bourgeoisie. As Marx argued, capitalism thrives by extracting surplus value from labour and externalising costs onto the most vulnerable. In South Africa, this vulnerability is acutely gendered, with Black, working-class women facing the harshest consequences of unaffordable electricity. The People’s Red Caravan Campaign demands a reckoning with this system, rallying communities to reject neoliberal cost recovery and fight for energy as a public good.
The Gendered Burden of Electricity Price Increases
Women, as the primary caregivers and household managers in most South African homes, bear a disproportionate burden of rising electricity costs. Marxist feminism highlights how reproductive labour i.e. cooking, cleaning, childcare and other unpaid domestic work sustains capitalism by reproducing the labour force. Electricity is critical to this labour, powering appliances, lighting and heating that enable women to fulfil these roles. When prices soar, women face impossible choices like pay the electricity bill or buy food, medicine or school supplies.
In rural and informal urban settlements, where electricity access is limited, women often resort to unsafe alternatives like paraffin, wood or coal. These fuels expose women and children to indoor air pollution, with a 2021 study estimating that household air pollution from traditional cooking stoves kills 490,000 Sub-Saharan Africans annually, disproportionately affecting women due to their role as cooks. The People’s Red Caravan Campaign amplifies these struggles, advocating for safe, affordable energy to alleviate women’s health burdens and challenge their subordination under capitalism.
The economic fallout of the electricity crisis, such as factory closures, job losses and reduced productivity, further entrenches women’s precarity. South Africa’s unemployment rate, at 31.9% in Q4 2024, is higher for women, particularly Black women, who face exclusion from the labour market. The informal sector, where many women operate small businesses like food stalls or hair salons, has been crippled by high electricity costs and past load shedding. The People’s Red Caravan Campaign mobilises these women, uniting them in a collective struggle against economic marginalisation and patriarchal exploitation.
Intersectionality: Race, Class, and Gender in the Crisis
The People’s Red Caravan Campaign embraces an intersectional approach, recognising that Black working-class women face a triple oppression of race, class, and gender. Apartheid’s legacy of spatial planning has left Black communities with inadequate infrastructure and reliance on prepaid electricity metres, which disconnect households when funds run out, plunging women into darkness and insecurity. The campaign highlights how these metres, a tool of neoliberal cost recovery, exacerbate women’s vulnerability.
The electricity crisis also amplifies gender-based violence, a systemic issue rooted in capitalist patriarchy. Power outages create unsafe environments, limiting women’s mobility and increasing their risk of assault. In 2023, Prof. Odile Mackett noted the “profoundly negative” impact of load shedding on women’s safety, a concern the People’s Red Caravan Campaign seeks to address by demanding energy justice as a feminist issue. By mobilising communities, the campaign confronts the systemic violence that devalues women’s lives and labour.
A Socialist Feminist Response Aligned with the People’s Red Caravan Campaign
The People’s Red Caravan Campaign rejects capitalist solutions like private power generation or market-driven renewable energy transitions, which prioritise corporate profits over social needs. Instead, it demands a socialist feminist response to the electricity crisis, rooted in the following principles:
- Nationalisation and democratic control of energy: The campaign calls for Eskom’s full nationalisation under democratic worker and community control, ensuring affordable, reliable electricity as a public good. This prioritises women’s needs, reducing the burden of reproductive labour and enhancing safety.
- Subsidised electricity for the working class: A progressive tariff system, where the wealthy and corporations bear the cost, would provide subsidised or free basic electricity to working-class households, especially those headed by women, aligning with Marx’s principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”
- Investment in safe, sustainable alternatives: Through the People’s Red Caravan, we must advocate for state-funded clean energy solutions, like solar or wind, for rural and informal settlements, reducing women’s reliance on hazardous fuels. Training programs would empower women in the renewable energy sector, challenging gendered occupational segregation.
- A just transition centred on women: South Africa’s shift from coal to renewables must prioritise women in coal-dependent regions through state-led job creation, retraining, and social protections, countering the exclusionary neoliberal REI4P (Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme).
- Mass mobilisation and feminist solidarity: The People’s Red Caravan Campaign unites workers, women, and communities in a mass movement for energy justice. Women’s organisations, trade unions, and progressive forces lead this struggle, building solidarity to dismantle capitalist patriarchy.
Toward a Socialist Feminist Future with the People’s Red Caravan Campaign
The electricity price crisis is a microcosm of capitalism’s failure, exposing how profit-driven systems exploit and marginalise women. As we honour Women’s Month, the People’s Red Caravan Campaign recommits to the revolutionary vision of Marxism: a world where energy serves the people, not the ruling class. By centring women’s struggles in our fight for socialism, the campaign paves the way for a society free from oppression, where every woman can live with dignity, safety, and power - both literal and political.
Cde Aviwe is the National Education Officer at Nehawu
SOURCES:
- Eskom Annual Reports (available at: https://www.eskom.co.za/about-eskom/annual-reports/)
BusinessTech, “Eskom Price Hikes: 2007 to 2023” (for historical context, extendable to 2025 via inflation adjustments).
- Household Air Pollution and Health Impacts: World Health Organization (WHO), 2021. “Household Air Pollution and Health.” Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health
- Unemployment Rate in South Africa: Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS), Q4 2024. Available at: https://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0211
- Gendered Impacts of Load Shedding: Mackett, O., 2023. “The Gendered Impact of Load Shedding in South Africa.” Blog post highlighting the negative effects on women’s safety and economic opportunities. Originally published on platforms like The Conversation or similar academic outlets. Available at: https://theconversation.com/africa for related articles.
- General Context on Neoliberal Policies and Eskom: Bond, P., 2020. “Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Public Services in South Africa.” Journal of African Political Economy. Provides background on Eskom’s mismanagement and neoliberal restructuring. Available via academic databases like Taylor & Francis or JSTOR.
- GroundUp, 2023–2025. Various articles on Eskom’s state capture, corruption, and tariff hikes. Available at: https://www.groundup.org.za/
Cde Aviwe Rapelang Mohapi is the National Education Officer at NEHAWU.
A call for solidarity with the women of Palestine
Hanan Jarrar
This Women ’s Month, as we honour the spirit of working-class women in South Africa, I write to share how the Israeli occupation targets not only our land, but our wombs, our dignity, and our right to exist.
In the face of military occupation, apartheid walls, the Israeli genocidal war raining bombs against our people, the women of Palestine have always stood at the frontline of struggle, of survival, of resistance. It is the Palestinian woman who feeds the hungry, buries the dead, holds the line.
The numbers are staggering, but they only scratch the surface of our grief. Since October 2023, more than 60,000 Palestinian civilians have been murdered by the Israeli occupation, most of them women and children. In Gaza, the airstrikes have not only flattened entire neighbourhoods but turned maternity wards, schools, and shelters into graveyards. Over 148,000 Palestinians have been injured, many of them maimed for life. Over 1.5 million people have been displaced, many more than once. Schools, refugee camps, churches and mosques have not been spared from bombings.
A recent food security report by the UN estimates that nearly 2 million people in Gaza will face severe food insecurity in the coming months, with 345,000 at risk of catastrophic hunger.
The situation is especially dire for children: by August 2025, over 60,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition are expected among those under five years old. As of now, at least 127 people in Gaza have died from starvation.
In the West Bank, where Israeli forces and settlers operate with impunity, over 7,500 civilians have been wounded during raids, arrests, and settler attacks, killing over 1,000 Palestinians.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed that at least 50 000 Palestinians have been displaced in the West Bank this year under Israel ’s “Iron Wall” military operation.
This is a genocidal war on the Palestinian body, especially the bodies of women. We are the ones left to dig children from rubble with our bare hands. We are the ones giving birth under siege, without electricity, sterile equipment, or anaesthetics. We are the ones who cradle the dying, ration the food, and stitch hope into our broken communities. And yet, Palestinian women are not passive victims. We are also freedom fighters, journalists, doctors, negotiators, and mothers of martyrs. We do not only survive, we also resist.
I chose diplomacy not out of privilege, but as a path carved by necessity. I was born, raised, educated, married, and became a mother under occupation. The Israeli apartheid wall encircled my town. Military checkpoints decided when I could go to school, or whether I could see my family. I presented my ID to armed teenage soldiers just to move between villages. These humiliations were part of our daily routine, and for many years, I thought that was normal. But injustice should never be normalised.
It was in these conditions that I found my purpose, to speak for my people in spaces where our voices are often ignored or distorted. I became a diplomat to carry the truth of Palestine to the world. To represent every Palestinian woman who has ever had to choose to be silent to stay alive, or resist to truly live.
I am honoured to commemorate Women ’s Month serving as the Ambassador of the State of Palestine to South Africa, a country whose own struggle for liberation taught the world that apartheid can be dismantled. I carry with me the stories of women who give birth while bombs fall. Women who bleed through trauma, displacement, and dispossession, but who still find the strength to lead. Women who raise orphans, rebuild homes, and raise flags of defiance where the world expects ashes.
Palestinian women bear the burden of endless loss in the same ashes found in refugee camps, in shattered homes, in hospitals that stand half‑collapsed.
Since October 2023, more than 1.9 million people in Gaza have been displaced; according to UN Women, this includes nearly a million women and girls facing crisis-level insecurity, overcrowded shelters, and a lack of privacy and sanitation; risks that escalate gender violence and maternal harm.
Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Commission further found that sexual and gender‑based violence, including forced stripping, rape threats, and sexual assault, has become a method of warfare by Israeli forces and settlers, part of what it classifies as standard operating procedures
We face economic ruin as well. In Gaza, employment has plummeted, job losses have reached over 80% by mid‑2024, and GDP shrank by more than 80% in one quarter. In the West Bank, restrictions and settler violence displaced workers and cut livelihoods. Women, many sole providers, suffer the brunt of these losses, some forced to work in exploitative conditions in illegal settlements, without contracts, safety, or dignity.
Mental health is deteriorating as well. Studies show that proximity to military checkpoints and settlements significantly worsens youth psychological well‑being. For Palestinian women, trauma compounds- we live at the intersection of grief, economic precarity, and social erosion.
The unprecedented step of taking Israel to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, later followed by many other countries, set a global precedent in the defence of human rights and international law.
That same spirit of principled resistance runs through the women of this land. As we mark Women ’s Month in South Africa, let us honour the names of Lillian Ngoyi, Charlotte Maxeke, Albertina Sisulu, and 20 000 of your women who marched in Pretoria in 1956, so that your daughters could walk free today. Palestinian women resist in Gaza today so our daughters might live. We must honour the women who understood that the chains on one are the chains on all.
The women of Palestine stand in that same tradition. Every mother who gives birth in a shelter, every girl who carries water under drones, every teacher who continues a lesson beneath a broken roof, is a comrade in the liberation struggle.
So I say to you, do not look at Palestine and say, "What a tragedy." Look at Palestine and ask, “What must be done?”
Speak. Organise. Protest. Boycott. Name the oppressor. Defend the truth. If you believe apartheid was a crime in South Africa, you must recognise it in Palestine. If you believe the women of 1956 marched for dignity, then you must walk beside the women of Gaza today.
Let no one be free while others remain in chains.
Ambassador Hanan Jarrar is the Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the State of Palestine to the Republic of South Africa and non-resident Ambassador to Namibia, Malawi and Lesotho
Three women, one struggle: the People’s Red Caravan is smashing capitalism
Thabile Lenkwane
The People’s Red Caravan confirms that none of us are free under capitalism. In South Africa today, three women start their day under the same sky but in vastly different worlds.
One rises in a shack with no running water. She’s a street vendor, her body her only guarantee of income. Another boards a minibus taxi in her uniform, a cashier in a retail chain who clocks in to survive the month. The third woman sets her GPS for an office park. She’s a manager, educated and salaried, working in government or the corporate sector. She has medical aid and a bond on a house. She is “up”. But not free.
Different women. Different wages. Different routines. But all of them live under a system that takes from them more than it gives and then convinces them to call it normal.
This system is capitalism. And it is not broken. It is working exactly as it was designed to: to extract labour, to concentrate wealth and to divide the working class, especially women, by income, status and illusion.
The first woman knows she ’s at the bottom. The second is told she ’s surviving. The third is rewarded just enough to forget how precarious her comfort really is.
But in truth, none of them own what they build, none of them control what they sustain, and all of them are disposable to the system they keep alive.
The vendor holds up the informal economy, the only economy many Black families still have. The cashier holds up the formal sector, feeding families while barely feeding her own. The manager holds up a collapsing institution, tasked with delivering public services while the state cuts the very budgets she must defend.
They differ not in importance, but in how close they are to the cliff edge. And under capitalism, the cliff edge is always shifting.
As Marx warned, capital not only exploits labour, it annihilates it. Piece by piece, hour by hour, capitalism eats through the time, health, and humanity of workers until there ’s nothing left to take.
It doesn ’t just exploit the vendor; it robs her of time to raise her child. It doesn ’t just underpay the cashier; it keeps her working weekends, unable to rest. It doesn ’t just overwork the manager; it isolates her, rewards her with consumption while denying her political power.
The destruction is social, spiritual, and generational.
Capitalism teaches the manager to look past the vendor, to blame the cashier for being unskilled, to fear the proximity to poverty as if her own position wasn ’t two salary delays away from collapse. It encourages each woman to compete, to perform, to prove her value through productivity while keeping quiet about the structure that benefits from their separation.
But the truth is: the vendor is not poor by accident. The cashier is not overworked by coincidence. The manager is not safe by merit.
They are positioned this way by a system that needs someone to clean, someone to manage, and someone to consume, but does not care if any of them burn out, break down, or disappear.
And when they do, they will be replaced. Quietly. Cheaply.
So long as the women remain disconnected, capital will remain secure.
This is why feminist struggle must be class struggle, not as an add-on, but as its foundation. Because the war on women is not just domestic, it is economic, political, and systemic.
It plays out in public hospitals with no trauma counsellors. In underfunded ECD centres where women work for stipends. In gender desks with no real power. In payroll systems that reward male executives and feminise poverty.
The People’s Red Caravan stands in stark contrast to the isolation capitalism demands of us. It is a living demonstration of revolutionary solidarity that extends to all three women. The Red Caravan shows what a movement from below looks like. It brings the healing of broken clinics. It brings food where poverty roams unchecked. It brings infrastructure where neglect had built fences around communities. It is the vendor’s time gained, the cashier’s support claimed, and the manager’s politics renewed.
To the woman in the shack: you are not invisible. You are over-exploited. To the woman behind the till: you are not failing. You are being crushed by a system that was never meant to serve you. To the woman in the townhouse: you are not secure. You are being bought into silence.
Capitalism does not protect you. It merely delays your collapse.
This Women ’s Month must be more than symbolism. It must be a reckoning.
Because solidarity between these three women is not about kindness. It is about survival. It is about refusing to let class divide us while capital thrives on our division. It is about building a feminism that is not corporate, not curated, and not bought.
Because if we don ’t stand together they will come for us one by one.
And the cliff will not ask where you lived, what you earned, or who you voted for.
Three women. One system. One enemy. One struggle.
Until capitalism falls, none of us are free.
Cde Thabile Lenkwane a National Committee member of the YCLSA
On this Women's Month commemoration let’s join the People’s Red Caravan’s call for collective justice
Malefu Mokau
For years now, women have been marching and chanting “Am I next?”, “Not in my name”, “Justice for Lerato” in order to be taken seriously by the same people we voted into government.
Why is it that we as women have to mobilise ourselves to show that our lives matter too? Why is it that I have to be paranoid to survive, to be conscious of what I wear, how I walk, how I hold my bag in public, to watch what I say, be careful in sharing my location when I’m outside? Because the thought of my mother sitting on a mattress in a room with my corpse is unbearable for any daughter.
It’s baffling that I’ve had to normalise paranoia in order to survive, especially as a woman using public transport. I’ve succumbed to the reinforcement of patriarchal policing of how a woman should behave and dress in public spaces to avoid victimisation, whether it’s verbal, physical or sexual. Nevertheless, my safety has become a responsibility and a burden. I’ve had to learn how to curtail my freedom to occupy the same spaces that women like Lillian Ngoyi, Winnie Madikizela Mandela, Helen Joseph and Ruth First fought for us to occupy freely
The 9th August this year marks 30 years of commemorating and celebrating the courage and contributions of those who paved the way for women to have equal rights to education, to vote, to job opportunities, and the right to life, amongst many rights presently.
Sixty-nine years ago, thousands of women occupied the Union Buildings in Pretoria to challenge the apartheid regime’s pass laws, which restricted women’s movements while promoting inequality and discrimination based on their race and gender.
As we celebrate women’s month this year, I’m left to reflect on whether I should celebrate being a woman or celebrate surviving as a woman in a democratic South Africa. I regard myself as being fortunate so far, because this year marks eight years since Karabo Mokoena was stabbed, burned and abandoned in the bush by her boyfriend; six years since Uyinene Mrwetyana was raped, murdered and her body hid in a post office safe; five years since the lifeless body of eight-months pregnant Tshegofatso Pule was found hanging from a tree; two years since Ntokozo Xaba was stabbed to death at a campus residence in Pretoria; and, less than three months since Olorato Mongale’s lifeless body was dumped in Lombardy West, Johannesburg.
Hence, I ask myself what is there to celebrate as a woman in South Africa, when there is there’s no space I can occupy without fearing for my life. “Take up space” these are the words of one of the most famous crowned Miss South Africa 2019, Zozibini Tunzi, shared.
She inspired so many young girls to take up space by being true to themselves, living their lives loudly and pursuing their dreams unapologetically, but how do we do that when we have to negotiate the right to everyday life?
As a commuter, I know never to speak “out of place”. I know never to walk over Nelson Mandela Bridge alone or after a certain time – I know never to ask anyone for directions – nor to stop for anyone and to walk like I know where I’m going even when I don’t.
Taking up space has become a gendered phenomenon, and subconsciously women have had to adopt these survival mechanisms to exist in a society that dedicates the month of August to those who have long fought for our freedom, dignity and equality.
It is in this context that the People’s Red Caravan takes on deep significance during this period. The Caravan is not only a symbolic march through communities, but a living reminder that freedom must be defended in practice, not only celebrated in memory. Its work is rooted in socialist principles of collective safety and justice — affirming that a society where women continue to live under the shadow of gender-based violence and femicide is not truly free.
By occupying public spaces, raising consciousness, and mobilising communities, the Red Caravan affirms that the struggle for women’s dignity and safety is inseparable from the struggle for a just, socialist society.
As we commemorate Women’s Month this year, it must not be through remembrance and symbolic speeches alone, but societal change and measurable actions, because far too many of us live in fear of being next.
Cde Malefu Mokau is a member of the YCLSA
Pleasure is political too: revisiting Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
Sarah Mokwebo
South Africa is characterised by the liberation struggle and neocolonial constraints, marked by deep structural inequalities, enduring racialised economic hierarchies, persistent poverty, and the dominance of global and local capitalist interests over national priorities.
Women’s struggles are not immune to these forces, which intersect with patriarchy, economic marginalisation, and the devaluation of their work and lives.
As women, capitalism undervalues not only our labour but also our desires. The daily grind continues to restrict our autonomy in both intimate and economic spheres. Romantic and sexual relationships are often distorted by economic need and power imbalances.
In her book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, Kristen Ghodsee invites us to imagine women not only as mothers and caregivers, or comrades and workers, but also as desiring, joyful, pleasure-seeking beings. It’s a radical proposition, especially in societies where womanhood has long been synonymous with struggle and survival.
In South Africa in particular, womanhood is shaped by the legacies of colonisation, apartheid and racial capitalism. Too often, our history and political discourse speak of women only in relation to resistance, service and sacrifice. The revolutionary woman is described as tireless, selfless and always in the trenches.
Ghodsee offers a vision of womanhood beyond martyrdom. She reminds us that the material conditions of our lives – wages, care work, access to healthcare – affect not only our productivity but also our capacity for pleasure.
Drawing on ethnographic research and decades of comparative analysis between capitalist and socialist states, she shows a consistent pattern: in societies where women have access to healthcare, childcare, paid leave and economic security, they are more likely to leave unhappy relationships, enjoy sexual satisfaction, and lead fuller lives. Economic independence makes room for emotional and erotic independence. In countries with strong socialist legacies, women have often been freer to choose partners based on desire rather than dependence.
Economic independence is not only about providing jobs for women, but also about their dignity. It is not only about equal pay, but about building social systems that value care, redistributing domestic responsibilities, and ensuring women never have to trade their desires for survival. This is the true promise of socialism: creating the material conditions under which women can seek pleasure freely, without fear or dependence. Socialism without feminism is an unfinished revolution.
Pleasure is political. Under capitalism, it is unevenly distributed. Women work double shifts – one at the office and another at home. They are judged by their looks, expected to smile through pain, and rewarded for self-sacrifice. In many households, love is entangled with survival, and sex becomes a tool of negotiation rather than an expression of desire.
In commemorating Women’s Month, we must not only remember the women who fought and lost their lives for our liberation during apartheid, but insist that the ongoing struggle against patriarchy makes space for rest, pleasure and self-determination.
A liberation that neglects women’s emotional and sexual autonomy risks reproducing the very patriarchal norms it claims to disxmantle. We must reject the false binary that women can be “strong” or “sensual”, but never both. Liberation includes both vulnerability and desire.
Too often, Women’s Month becomes a glorification of hardship – a retelling of sacrifice that casts our heroines only as martyrs. But to truly honour women, we must demand more: the right to pleasure, to softness, to be loved on their own terms. A socialism worth building is one where women are not only free from violence and hunger, but free to rest, to laugh, to dance, to desire without shame or fear.
Cde Sarah Mokwebo is a National Committee member of the YCLSA
The People’s Red Caravan – practical alternatives to capitalism
Barry Mitchell
This is a reflection on the People’s Red Caravan in Matbidi Village, Mpumalanga.
By now, our readers have had a taste of what the SACP’s People’s Red Caravan (PRC) is based on: a programmatic campaign rooted in building community self-reliance, self-sustainability and popular democratic mobilisation; profiling our communities and identifying key socio-economic considerations affecting workers and the poor in both rural and urban settings. It infuses our base campaigns of Know and Act in your Neighbourhood, Triple H (Housing, Health, Hunger) and in building popular and progressive people-driven fronts.
From 20 to 27 July, the second provincial launch of the PRC took place in Matibidi village. This is a place in which colonial and apartheid land dispossession, cultural genocide and deprivation can be traced, felt and experienced in 2025.
Matibidi, like Mothlhabe village, is located a few kilometres from a multinational Swiss-Anglo commodity trading and mining company called Glencore, whose annual gross profits in 2024 exceeded $6.65 billion. The village is also located next to the famous South African landmark and natural wonder - the Three Rondavels.
This majestic setting saw the convergence of PRC volunteers and community members at the Mashilane Traditional Council offices, which would serve as the SACP’s provisional headquarters and our operations centre for the PRC.
Matibidi village is led by Kgošigadi Clara Bontle Mashile, Paramount Queen of the Mashilane Traditional Council. In the context of South Africa’s interlinked triple contradictions of race, class and gender, Kgošigadi Mashile is an inspiring example of courage, vision and passion for the people she leads. It was through the “Comrade” Queen and her Council that the PRC workstream focusing on education, health and social services were able to have a proper sense of the challenges facing the village.
We engaged all primary and secondary schools in the village, bearing witness to the extent to which years of budget cuts have had on infrastructure collapse, abysmal teacher-to-learner ratios (with some principals teaching up to five subjects) and the general state and quality of education. We found that pit latrines are being replaced with pit latrines, called Enviro Loos.
The tendered maintenance contract of these euphemised pit latrines expired in December 2024, it was not renewed as a result of austerity, teachers are now forced to take up this task. The aesthetic of classrooms resembles a prison cell, the environment is simply not conducive for education and teachers lack the most basic tools of trade - paper and other stationary.
Despite these conditions, the spirit and resilience of the learners is inspiring. They are highly active in a number of cultural and sporting activities, all of the schools host cabinets adorned with medals and trophies awarded to students. The National Lottery had resourced and constructed an Early Childhood Development (ECD) centre in Matibidi, the facilities of which had been obliterated by a storm in 2024, and our team used the work week to clear the space and repair the roof.
Matibidi hosts a District Hospital, a clinic and a disability centre. The deteriorating standards of public health are apparent in all three of these facilities. Staff shortages as a result of budget cuts, overcrowding and dilapidated infrastructure and lacking the basics - lighting, filing cabinets etc.
The PRC launch also arranged for a certified acupuncture practitioner provide clinic staff and community members with treatments for sleep deprivation, anxiety/stress, hypertension, blood circulation and other ailments. Comrade Sechaba treated over 110 patients by the end of the week and will be joining us for all other provincial launches. The PRC also organised for the National Department of Health to deploy its mobile unit for voluntary testing for diabetes , blood pressure and HIV as well as providing counseling and medical advice to community members.
A large percentage of the village is unemployed and reliant on social services to survive from month-to-month. The closest access point to retrieve a grant is about 50 kilometers away, costing an exorbitant amount for transport.
Other access points are local spaza shops that extort a 10% surcharge on withdrawals of the grant - an endless cycle of poverty. The PRC was also approached by a number of community members who had identified orphaned children who had no birth certificates, identity documents thus impairing their dignity and stunting societal growth and development.
The PRC intervened in these cases, ensuring that the Department of Home Affairs’ mobile unit be deployed to assist these and other community members. These are just a few of the activities and interventions of the workstream, other teams worked tirelessly in cultivating the communal land and in preparing poultry and fish farms.
Other comrades worked non-stop towards the grand opening of Bereki Community Consumer Cooperative. The commitment from the Party leadership in the province and districts of Mpumalanga was awe-inspiring, on the second day a sizable contingent of volunteers all the way from Mothalbe village in the North-West, joined the PRC activities.
For the comrades that have yet to have a practical experience of the PRC, these rural settings might seem remote. The Party’s growing working relationship with traditional leaders might also seem like a contradiction to some. Or perhaps some feel that the Party is merely touring the country in preparation for the upcoming 2026 Local Government Elections.
These critiques, constructive or not, are expected. What we have experienced is that most of our people’s challenges are a result of systemic governance failures and the state’s dangerous reliance on a failed tender system to procure and provide basic services.
We have also experienced the extent to which multi-billion Dollar foreign and domestic companies exploit our people and the natural resources of this country. Glencore, the Patrice Motsepe Foundation and various State Owned Enterprises all made numerous promises to these communities to assist and support as part of their corporate social initiatives or responsibilities. None have fulfilled these commitments. These elements have all amplified the crisis of social reproduction in our communities and, at the root of this barbarous system is the failure to implement an impactful land reform and redistribution policy.
Unfortunately our people have been transformed by the state into clients and customers, their basic needs are now controlled by extortionists and tenderpreneurs. The PRC interventions break this reliance on a failed system and place their development and trajectory firmly within the hands of the community themselves.
This is the alternative that we are building. Regardless of the challenges and despite the critiques, we urge our readers, members and supporters to join the next PRC and help build this alternative through practical experiences.
Cde Barry Mitchell is an SACP Central Committee Member and NEHAWU Parliamentary Officer.
Premier Allan Winde’s 'doing more with less' fails workers and the wider public in the Western Cape
Benson Ngqentsu
In his State of the Province Address, Western Cape Premier Allan Winde introduced “doing more with less” as the guiding philosophy of the seventh administration.
This sentiment was later echoed by the MEC for Finance, Diedre Baartman. But this neoliberal doctrine has gone largely unchallenged by the provincial and national media. Their silence is not surprising; it only reaffirms Karl Marx’s insight that in a class-divided society, the dominant ideas are those of the ruling class.
In the Western Cape, neoliberalism, as a stage of capitalist development, remains the prevailing doctrine. And, as with all capitalist systems, it is the ruling system deeply embedded in our political and administrative structures.
Contrary to the ideology of “doing more with less,” the bureaucracy of the Western Cape government is in crisis. Workers are overburdened, service delivery is compromised, and the very capacity of the state is being eroded. The fixation with a leaner state has hollowed out departments, most notably the Department of Mobility.
A striking example of this systemic failure is the chronic vacancy rate within the Department of Mobility, which stands at an alarming 32.8%, the highest of any province in the country. Compounding the problem further, these vacancies are concentrated in senior, skilled production, and supervisory roles with 75% of vacancies falling in this category. This picture was painted by the Western Cape Department of Mobility before the Standing Committee for Public Accounts on Friday, 8 August 2025.
The report of the Department to SCOPA further reported that despite the Western Cape’s sizable economy, its Mobility Department operates with far fewer directorates compared to provinces of similar or larger economic stature. For instance, Gauteng has four Deputy Director-Generals, KwaZulu-Natal has three, while the Western Cape has none. According to a briefing by the Mobility officials, the department’s actual vacancy rate is 30.2%, second only to Gauteng. This is indicative not of efficiency, but of administrative atrophy.
The officials from the department, in their own words, further told the Standing Committee that “This requires teams to perform additional functions for which there should ordinarily be dedicated capacity (for example, freight) or seek external specialised skills.”
In other words, the Department of Mobility in the Western Cape has been designed not to perform. Staff are stretched beyond capacity, key functions are either neglected or outsourced, and the burden continues to fall on already overstretched dedicated public servants.
Sadly, it is evident that the consequence of the DA’s downsizing remains a compromise to effective service delivery. Communities that depend on reliable mobility infrastructure are shortchanged, and public servants are pushed to the brink all in the name of an ideology that prioritises austerity over human need.
This is, in essence, a plea to Premier Winde to abandon the neoliberal doctrine of ‘doing more with less.’ It is not only unsustainable, but harmful to the professional public service, to the people of the Western Cape, and an antithesis of any envisaged developmental state.
Further, for Premier Winde to listen to this clarion call, organised labour in the Western Cape Mobility Department, in particular, Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) and the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) must step up and lead a Broad Popular Front against the chronic crisis of vacancies in the Mobility Department.
The filling of the vacancies should be used as an opportunity to drive our progressive transformation agenda. The department must be made to meet equity targets and drive transformation. Workers must rise and confront neoliberalism or risk perishing!!
Finally, now is the time for a people-centred, pro-public investment approach. One that recognises that efficient governance is not achieved by shrinking the state, but by strengthening it with capable personnel, adequate resources, and a commitment to social justice as a tenet for a developmental state.
Cde Benson Ngqentsu ANC Spokesperson for Mobility in the Western Cape Provincial Legislature and SACP Provincial Secretary
The Freedom Charter at 70: a vision still to be realised
Mafika Mndebele
Seventy years ago, the oppressed people of South Africa gathered in Kliptown to declare, through the Freedom Charter, that “The People Shall Govern”. In that historic moment, the Charter crystallised the minimum demands of our National Democratic Revolution — demands that remain, to this day, both a rallying cry for unity and a measure of how far our struggle must still advance.
In Marxist terms, the Freedom Charter is what Lenin would call a minimum programme: a set of transitional demands that unite the broadest layers of the oppressed to overthrow the immediate system of oppression — apartheid colonialism — and clear the path for the maximum programme: socialism.
When Marx and Engels drafted the Communist Manifesto in 1848, they coupled an uncompromising class perspective with a practical transitional platform. They understood that a working-class revolution does not fall from the sky: it must pass through definite stages, guided by a scientific programme that links immediate demands to the strategic goal of abolishing capitalist exploitation. Likewise, the Bolsheviks, under Lenin’s leadership, adopted the Programme of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919. It outlined how to consolidate working-class power: nationalising land, banks, and heavy industry — placing the commanding heights under the control of the workers’ state. The Bolshevik programme was not abstract theory; it was a guide to revolutionary action.
Our Freedom Charter — adopted in Kliptown in 1955 — stands in this tradition. It is not a socialist constitution, but a national democratic roadmap. It connects the immediate needs of the oppressed majority — land, work, housing, equal rights, democratic governance — with the structural transformation of the colonial and capitalist base inherited from imperial conquest.
Measured against its own vision, the Freedom Charter remains partially fulfilled. The people do govern — formally. We dismantled apartheid’s legal framework, won universal suffrage, and built democratic institutions that would have been unthinkable under colonial rule. Millions have houses, electricity, water and basic health care that were systematically denied before.
But the deeper structural clauses of the Charter — “The wealth of the country shall be shared”, “The land shall be shared among those who work it”, “The banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people” — remain largely aspirational. Marxists must speak the uncomfortable truth: the economic base of white monopoly capital remains intact. The land remains undistributed. The mines, the banks, the major industries continue to serve the narrow interests of the ruling capitalist class, not the democratic will of the people.
Even where the state has intervened — through BEE charters, mining charters, land restitution, public development finance — the underlying system of profit before people persists. The partial reforms achieved under a democratic state exist within a global capitalist order that rewards accumulation and punishes redistribution.
Lenin teaches that the state is an instrument of class rule. Under our national democratic order, the state is a site of contestation between the interests of the capitalist class and the revolutionary-democratic will of the people. This is why state institutions themselves become battlegrounds — for control over budgets, tenders, mineral rights, finance, land and credit. The fact that Ithala SOC — a people’s financial institution built to expand access to finance for the historically dispossessed — finds itself suffocated by regulatory constraints designed for commercial banks shows how capitalist law and policy remain deeply entrenched. The same can be said for our endless struggle to resolve the land question, or to re-industrialise the economy under working-class control.
Marxists understand that the Freedom Charter is not a substitute for the maximum programme — it is the bridge. The National Democratic Revolution is not an end in itself, but a battlefield that must clear the way for socialism. In our context, this means defending democratic gains from liberal rollback and capitalist co-option; deepening democratic control of the state — not only through elections but through working-class organisation and oversight; using the state’s strategic levers — public banks, development finance, land redistribution, strategic industries — to break the stranglehold of monopoly capital; and fusing the struggles of workers, peasants, youth and women into a united front that can push beyond the limits of liberal democracy toward a socialist order.
As we mark 70 years since the adoption of the Freedom Charter, our task is not to mourn unfinished business but to renew our revolutionary obligation to finish it. The Charter’s promise that “The land shall be shared among those who work it” must be fought for through radical land redistribution — not endless commissions and legal obstructions. The clause that “The wealth of the country shall be shared” must find real expression in public ownership of mines, banks, and monopoly industries that extract profits from our people and send them abroad.
The battle for Ithala is a test case: can we defend a people’s bank, or will we allow capital and bureaucrats to suffocate it under laws made to protect commercial banking oligarchs? In the final analysis, only a politically conscious, organised working class can complete the tasks set down at Kliptown. The slogans of 1955 must become the transitional demands that link democratic struggle to the final victory of socialism.
As we celebrate the Freedom Charter’s 70th anniversary, we must declare again: The people shall govern. The land shall belong to those who work it. The wealth shall serve the people. This is the unfinished business of our National Democratic Revolution — and it remains the historic mission of all genuine Marxist-Leninists today.
Cde Mafika Mndebele is an SACP member
Sudan – the Quartet meeting in Washington and missing issues
Yassir Arman
We welcome all regional and international efforts aimed at ending the war in Sudan, especially when they come from countries with significant influence such as the US, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Republic of Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (the Quartet), whose agreement brings us closer to peace.
However, based on our experience and having worked closely in effective forums for peace and ending the war, the political process for more than three decades, we can say that it is useful to look at the Quartet forum, taking into account past experiences.
The Quartet raises important questions that must be answered and issues that must be addressed. External mediators, particularly the US administration, have worked with the Sudanese parties and taken their views into account in consultations held in the public sphere with the participation of the relevant forces and public opinion to the extent possible.
The Washington platform has neither engaged Sudanese forces nor addressed local, regional, and global public opinion on the situation. Even its postponement has left room for speculation on an issue that foremost affects the future of Sudanese women and men. We must take this platform seriously, as every person takes its present and future seriously. In the midst of war, suffering, and frustration, dialogue on this platform remains essential, bringing to the fore these key issues:
Who owns the peace and the political process?
Although regional and international roles are significant, the most important thing is the people of Sudan and that they are the owners of the peace process. There must be mechanisms for transparent consultation with the Sudanese, particularly the victims of war and the democratic civil forces. Writing a treatment plan requires meeting with the patient, listening carefully, and conducting the necessary examinations. Effective treatment depends on a healthy relationship between patient and doctor, with the patient’s needs being more important than the differences between the doctors.
The Quartet needs to consult with the victims of war and the owners of Sudan's future and present, who number in the millions, and take their issues and aspirations into account, especially accountability, justice, and a new project to build the state and complete the revolution.
Civil society and political forces must closely monitor the Quartet's platform, demand the necessary consultations with, and lead a popular campaign across all platforms, media, and other effective methods. We must not stand by and watch the future of our country- its security, unity, and sovereignty- is at stake.
Pursuing a Comprehensive Solution through Mediation
While the Quartet includes key actors, it should also engage the IGAD, the African Union, Sudan's closest neighbours, countries already involved in the peace process in Sudan, the United Nations, the European Union and the Security Council’s permanent members. This inclusive partnership would strengthen the Quartet’s mediation while maintaining its unique role.
The Sudanese parties necessary for the solution need a mechanism for participation and inclusiveness. The Quartet has expressed concern that the National Congress Party and the Sudanese Islamic Movement may pose significant challenges to solutions and internal and external stability, given their links to terrorism, and has called for appropriate classification measures.
Finally, the Quartet needs to adopt a comprehensive approach and a comprehensive package that addresses the humanitarian disaster and protects civilians through an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and an effective monitoring mission. This should serve as a gateway to a broader package that expands civilian space, enables the voluntary return of displaced persons and refugees to their homes, and links the cessation of war to a comprehensive political process. Such a process must address the root cause of the crisis, including the establishment of a single professional army, democratic civil governance, rural development, citizenship without discrimination, and other key elements of a new national project.
The postponement of the Quartet meeting is an opportunity to achieve a peaceful, comprehensive, successful, effective, and non-fragile political process that puts pressure on the forces of war and restrains them. This requires an internal front that trusts the Quartet's roadmap and works with it to pave the way for sustainable and just peace.
It is in the interest of the Quartet and its partners that the Sudanese people place their trust in the peace and political processes, standing together in unity against the forces of war, for peace and a democracy that belongs to the people of Sudan.
Cde Yassir Arman, Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM)
Kalushi Solomon Mahlangu – symbol of all the freedom fighters who were sentenced to death
Mthetheleli Mncube
As he climbed the 52 steps leading to death, Kalushi Solomon Mahlangu looked at the wall clock on his left. He noticed that the time was exactly 7 am, 6 April 1979. He knew that this was the last time that he would see time on earth.
He shed a tear, but no one saw it as a few seconds later a white hood was placed over his head. He was pushed with such force that he suddenly found himself standing on a trap door – a trap door between life and death and a trap door between time and eternity.
Fear filled his heart as a thick, tight rope was placed and firmly secured over his neck. His heartbeat reached a crescendo.
The executioner calmly ate his white bread and polony sandwich. Without further thought, he pulled the trap door lever. This opened the trap door with a loud bang. The sound was so loud that it could be heard in the cells of all fellow death row prisoners. One can only imagine what went through their minds.
Kalushi lost his balance, and his body weight propelled him downwards, causing the rope around his neck to squeeze the life breath out of him. He fought for his life, but those who watched witnessed a macabre death dance.
Unable to breathe, his blood vessels burst, and soon his white hood was soaked with blood, saliva and foam. His digestive system released its last stool. His vital organs shut down one by one; his heart was the last to go.
Kalushi was soon enveloped by a bright light. Like an astronomer, he felt weightless and free.
Soon, he began to see figures in the distance, which became clearer with each passing second. Soon he could clearly recognise Chief Albert Luthuli, Vuyisile Mini, Wilson Khayinga and Zinakile Mkhaba. They all smiled at him and beckoned him to come closer.
Kalushi looked at his bloody and lifeless body for the last time, and with a smile, he followed his comrades into eternity.
May the souls of all our comrades who died in the cause of our struggle in different circumstances rest in eternal peace.
Remembered by a death row survivor, a dead man walking.
Cde Mthetheleli Mncube is a former MK soldier and former death-row prisoner
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