Sea Point falls silent as women withdraw their labour — and consent — from a failing state

Sea Point Promenade fell silent at noon on Friday, 21 November as hundreds joined a 15-minute “silent lie-down” – one minute for each woman murdered on average every day in South Africa – as part of a nationwide shutdown stretching across 15 meet-up points.

The shutdown, led by Women For Change, called on women and LGBTQI+ people to halt all paid and unpaid work, avoid spending, and wear black in mourning and resistance.

It forms part of a petition-driven campaign calling for gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide to be declared a national disaster. More than a million people have signed the petition.

Between July and September 2024, a Human Sciences Research Council study found that nearly 1,000 women were murdered, more than 10,000 rapes reported, and thousands were victims of attempted murders and assaults.

Yet the National Disaster Management Centre has previously rejected Women For Change’s calls to declare it a national disaster.

But on Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa told the G20 Social Summit that SA “has declared gender-based violence and femicide a national crisis” and must take “extraordinary and concerted action” to end it.

In Sea Point, the 15-minute silence underscored what government leadership has yet to fully confront: the profound social and economic cost of a country failing to protect its women.

Daily Maverick attended the protest in Sea Point and talked to some of the participants. Here’s what they had to say:

“The turnout today was great, it’s a lot better than I expected,” said Hannah, a protest participant. “Here’s to hoping that it does something, fingers crossed.”

“The queer community showing up is really important to us,” said Megan, who is a member of the queer community herself. “It’s really special to know that we can do something like this and feel safe to do it.”

“I’m very inspired and very grateful that we can come together as youth,” Liwonga, an 18-year-old future student, said. “We’re not safe and we’re not being heard, and we need the government to be taking these things as seriously as possible.”

“I experience the feeling of not being safe every day as a woman,” Liwonga told Daily Maverick. “I’ve been personally affected by gender-based violence throughout my years. From childhood, and also being around boys at school, in primary school even. From then, I’ve been experiencing sexual harassment from boys my age and sexual assault, groping and all those things.”

Hope, a mother to a young girl, expressed concerns about raising a woman in a country fraught with gender-based violence. “I’m even scared when somebody else needs to pick her up from school,” she said. “For me, this really means something, especially for the future of my own child.”

“Where I was studying and where I was in res, an instance [of gender-based violence] happened,” former university student Carin explained. “After finding out about the [incident], so many other girls came forward with things happening. And the university didn’t do anything.”

Atarah is another protestor who was frustrated with the way incidents of GBV are addressed and policed in SA. “There’s not enough consequences for men that do things like this,” she said. “We need to wake up. Also start with things like Chris Brown! Why are people still making this man so rich when he almost killed somebody?”

“There should be some form of consequence that scares men to think that it’s not okay,” Atarah said. DM