“Never underestimate the power of a determined woman”
Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela
26 September 1936 ~ 2 April 2018
There are generations that inherit wealth. There are generations that inherit institutions. There are generations that inherit peace.
South Africa inherited women.
Women whose courage came long before our constitution was written, their sacrifices became our democracy. These women whose compassion held together families, communities, and movements when the machinery of oppression sought to destroy them.
As a nation, we often speak of the men who led liberation struggles. We recite their names in speeches, erect monuments in their honour, and dedicate public holidays to their sacrifices. Yet beneath every freedom movement stood women whose labour, intellect, and resilience sustained the struggle.
This generation was breastfed by women such as Cecilia Makiwane, Phyllis Ntantala Jordan, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. We were nourished by their courage, their vision, and their unwavering belief in human dignity.
Today, as South Africa confronts deepening inequality, political disillusionment, unemployment, corruption, and a crisis of public trust, we must ask a difficult question:
What would happen if South African women once again occupied the centre of national leadership?
Cecilia Makiwane: The Politics of Care
Cecilia Makiwane occupies a unique place in South African history as the first black registered professional nurse in the country. Yet her significance extends far beyond that historic achievement.
At a time when colonial structures denied black people access to education, healthcare, and professional advancement, Makiwane demonstrated that excellence itself could be a form of resistance.
She understood something that contemporary politics often forgets. Nations are not only built. through legislation and elections. They are built through care. Healthcare, education, dignity, and community wellbeing are political questions.
The work of healing a nation is political work.
In many respects, Makiwane represented a distinctly African feminist ethic long. Her contribution reminds us that leadership must never be measured solely by power but by service.
South Africa desperately needs this ethic today.
A politics of care. A politics that doesn't ask how many votes can be won, but how many lives can be improved.
Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan: The Politics of Intellectual Courage
If Cecilia Makiwane taught us about care, Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan taught us about thought.
An educator, writer, scholar, and activist, Ntantala - Jordan belonged to a generation of black intellectual women who challenged both racial oppression and patriarchal assumptions.
Her memoirs remain among the most important accounts of twentieth-century South Africa because they illuminate a truth often absent from official histories: women were never passive observers of political change.
They were part of the architects of it.
Ntantala understood that knowledge itself is power.
She believed that education was not a route to employment but a means of liberation.
In today's South Africa, where anti-intellectualism often competes with expertise and where public discourse is increasingly polarised, her legacy demands renewed attention.
The future will not be secured through who makes the most noise or who trends.
It will require women who can think critically, govern ethically, analyse rigorously, and lead courageously.
South Africa needs more women in universities, boardrooms, laboratories, courts, legislatures, newsrooms, and policy institutions.
Not because representation is fashionable but because the nation cannot afford to leave half its intellectual capital untapped.
Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela: The Politics of Resistance
Few figures in South African history evoke stronger emotions than Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
Admired, criticised, celebrated, contested she remains one of the most complex political figures of the twentieth century.
Yet history is unequivocal on one point. When many leaders were imprisoned, exiled, silenced, or banned, uMamaWinnie stood.
She endured detention, banishment, surveillance, harassment, and isolation. She became the face of resistance in communities where apartheid's brutality was experienced daily.
Her significance lies in perseverance. She was unstoppable
She embodied a truth familiar to oppressed people throughout history. Liberation struggles are not carried by heroes, but by those who refuse to surrender.
The South Africa of today may not face apartheid, but it confronts new forms of injustice.
Women continue to bear the burden of poverty disproportionately.
Women continue to confront violence at alarming rates.
Women continue to perform the majority of unpaid work.
Women continue to be underrepresented in positions of economic power despite constituting the majority of the population.
The lesson from uMamaWinnie is that leadership requires fearlessness and persistence.
Ubuntu and the Feminine Architecture of Democracy
African political philosophy offers us a profound concept: Ubuntu. "I am because we are."
Ubuntu rejects the notion that human flourishing is individual. It insists that our wellbeing is interconnected. For generations, South African women have practised Ubuntu as their daily reality not as theory.
They have fed communities when governments failed, Raised children when fathers were absent, Organised resistance when institutions collapsed., Maintained social cohesion amidst violence and uncertainty. Women have often served as the invisible architecture of democracy. The foundations upon which society rests.
Yet the paradox of South Africa is that while women carry the nation, they are too often excluded from shaping its direction.
This must change.
A Call to Lead
The question facing South African women today is not whether they are capable of leadership.
History has already answered that question.
The question is whether enough women are willing to claim the authority that history has earned for them.
The nation does not need women only to participate.
It needs women to lead.
To lead municipalities.
To lead schools.
To lead businesses.
To lead social movements.
To lead universities.
To lead political parties.
To lead communities.
And yes, to lead the Republic itself. Not because women are inherently more virtuous than men, but because South Africa cannot solve twenty-first century problems with twentieth-century leadership models.
The challenges before us demand a new moral re-imagination.
It demands leaders capable of combining courage with compassion, strength with empathy, and vision with accountability.
The very qualities exemplified by Cecilia Makiwane, Phyllis Ntantala Jordan, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
The Generation We Owe
Every generation inherits a debt.
Our debt is to continue their work.
To build a South Africa where care is valued as highly as power.
Where knowledge is respected as much as wealth.
Where resilience is matched by justice.
Where girls grow up believing that leadership belongs naturally to them. I'm pretty sure that the women who came before us did not ask for monuments alone, they would want continuation.
Their struggle should never be an invitation to nostalgia.
It must be a summons to action.
As South Africa stands at another historical crossroads, perhaps the nation must once again turn to its daughters. For we were breastfed by giants, and giants do not raise followers.
They raised leaders.