Hundreds of women gathered in cities across South Africa on Friday to protest against gender-based violence in the country before the G20 summit in Johannesburg this weekend.
Demonstrators turned out in 15 locations – including Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban – wearing black as a sign of “mourning and resistance”.
They staged a peaceful 15-minute silent lie-down protest, symbolising the 15 lives lost daily to gender-based violence in the country.
South Africa has one of the world’s highest femicide rates, with UN Women estimating that it is five times higher than the global average.
Called the G20 Women’s Shutdown, it was organised by the NGO Women For Change, which urged women and LGBTQ+ communities to “refrain from all paid and unpaid work in workplaces, universities and homes, and to spend no money for the entire day to demonstrate the economic and social impact of their absence”.
“Because until South Africa stops burying a woman every 2.5 hours, the G20 cannot speak of growth and progress.”
The lie-down protest was the culmination of a month-long campaign by the group, lobbying the South African government to declare gender-based violence a national disaster. An online petition garnered more than a million signatures, while many people – including the Grammy-award winning singer Tyla – changed their social media profiles to purple, a colour often associated with women’s rights.
In response to the campaign, the head of the National Disaster Management Centre (NDMC), Dr Bongani Elias Sithole, announced on Friday that it would classify gender-based violence and femicide as a national disaster.
The NDMC had previously said that the categorisation did not meet the legal requirements defined in the Disaster Management Act; however, after evaluating “the persistent and immediate life-safety risks posed by ongoing acts of violence”, the centre concluded that it now met the threshold.
The minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs, Velenkosini Hlabisa, welcomed the decision, which will allow authorities to dedicate resources and strengthen their support of existing structures to combat gender-based violence.
“The women of our country are crying out that they need much more focus on the issue of gender-based violence,” South African president Cyril Ramaphosa said at a G20 sideline summit for civil society on Thursday. During the event he said the government would classify gender-based violence and femicide as a “crisis”.
Women For Change celebrated the announcement on its Instagram account, posting a statement saying “we have won”.
“We have written history together. We forced the country to finally confront the truth.” It added that next week it is planning to convene a follow-up meeting to discuss a “detailed action plan and timeline”.
