When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded its work in South Africa, it acknowledged women’s suffering under apartheid. The TRC even dedicated a special hearing on women to highlight their experiences.
Yet despite this recognition, its overall approach was largely gender blind. Women were often portrayed as mothers, wives or daughters of male activists rather than as independent victims.
Scholars have observed that the TRC framed women as secondary victims or relatives of male activists, rather than as individuals who endured systemic discrimination and violence under apartheid.
This pattern of erasure resonates deeply with South African women today. More than 30 years into democracy, women continue to face the consequences of a justice system that failed to address the patriarchal foundations underpinning their oppression.
The same harmful sociocultural norms that legitimised women’s oppression in the past persist today in all spheres of society. Where women’s experiences of violence and oppression are overlooked, they are also overlooked in the reparations that follow.
As South Africa marks Women’s Month and the African Union (AU) declares 2025 as the “Year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations”, we risk repeating this failure on a continental scale.
Unfulfilled constitutional promises
South Africa’s Constitution guarantees gender equality, yet the consequences of the TRC’s gender-blind approach persist today. Gender discrimination pervades South African society in myriad forms and gender-based violence continues to plague the country.
Women remain underrepresented in leadership, excluded from land ownership and affected by gender pay gaps that reflect deeply embedded assumptions about women’s worth. The patriarchal norms that apartheid exploited and amplified were never confronted, never dismantled.
This represents a profound failure to acknowledge international and regional human rights commitments, including obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women (Maputo Protocol).
The TRC could have used its moral authority to challenge these underlying patriarchal norms. Instead, by failing to address these root causes, South Africa’s justice process delivered justice for some while leaving women’s oppression intact.
Failing half of society
The AU’s 2025 theme recognises the “moral debt owed to African peoples which has yet to be paid” and frames reparations as a moral and legal imperative to address historic and contemporary harms arising from colonialism, enslavement and apartheid. This vision is ambitious and necessary.
Yet it suffers from the same blindness as the TRC.
The focus is overwhelmingly racial and economic, overlooking how colonialism, slavery and apartheid reinforced patriarchal hierarchies that continue to uniquely affect women and girls.
This matters. Women’s experiences of colonial and racial oppression intersect with deeply entrenched patriarchal norms and violence. When reparations ignore gendered harms, they don’t just fail women, they actively risk entrenching the very structures that sustain women’s inequality.
A gendered lens on reparations must, therefore, be integral to all efforts aimed at addressing these harms, both at continental and domestic levels.
The AU’s agenda stands in stark contrast with the Nairobi Declaration on Women’s and Girls’ Right to a Remedy and Reparation, which recognises that reintegration and restitution alone are insufficient. Reparations must transform the sociocultural injustices and structural inequalities that shape women’s and girls’ lives.
If the AU’s reparations agenda is to be truly transformative across the continent — including South Africa — it must centre women’s voices and priorities, focusing on the transformative potential of non-repetition through resocialisation. Failing to do so not only erases women’s historical and contemporary suffering, but also undermines the very purpose of reparations.
Resocialisation
The United Nations’ (UN’s) Basic Principles on Reparations outline five forms of reparations: restitution (restoring liberty, rights and property); compensation (covering economic and moral harm); rehabilitation (medical, legal and social services); satisfaction (truth-telling and acknowledgments of responsibility); and guarantees of non-repetition (education, training, and reform of discriminatory laws and practices).
It is the final element that holds the greatest transformative potential. Non-repetition in the context of gender-based harms demands resocialisation — a deliberate transformation of harmful sociocultural norms that sustain patriarchy.
Central to this transformative approach is the reconfiguration of these norms. As discussed elsewhere, resocialisation involves challenging and modifying harmful sociocultural patterns that perpetuate gender inequality, as international law demands.
Non-repetition is forward looking. It is not only about preventing a return to past violations, but also about dismantling the systems that allowed such violations to occur in the first place.
In the context of gender discrimination, this means confronting the patriarchal norms and stereotypes that legitimise the inequality and violence women in South Africa experience.
Both the UN Special Rapporteurs on Violence against Women and on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence have stressed that reparations must do more than restore women to their pre-violation state. They must work to dismantle the structures of patriarchy itself, ensuring long-term societal transformation.
The AU’s current reparations agenda need not repeat South Africa’s mistakes. Existing frameworks already provide a blueprint for transformation. The Nairobi Declaration calls for the transformation of socio-cultural injustices and structural inequalities.
Similarly, the Maputo Protocol explicitly calls for modifying harmful sociocultural norms. Integrating these frameworks into the African Common Position on reparations would ensure that women’s experiences are not an afterthought, but a guiding principle.
In practice, resocialisation offers a strategic pathway for achieving this transformation. It recognises that true justice requires confronting the narratives, stereotypes and sociocultural practices that normalise women’s inequality.
Crucially, this approach also recognises and supports women’s agency in transforming both their circumstances and the laws and norms that contribute to their oppression — particularly by supporting and protecting women’s rights activists and defenders leading these efforts.
Resocialisation involves coordinated action: educational programmes that dismantle stereotypes and harmful norms while advancing women’s rights; media and cultural efforts that shift gender narratives rooted in colonialism and patriarchy, and capacity-building for law enforcement, the judiciary and policymakers to address women’s harms without bias or prejudice.
Far from being peripheral, these interventions are essential for ensuring that reparations address the root causes of harm and create the necessary safeguards against recurrence.
Without resocialisation, guarantees of non-repetition risk remaining symbolic rather than substantive, and reparations risk becoming another arena where women’s voices are heard but not heeded, where their presence is acknowledged but their priorities ignored.
Path forward
For South Africa, and Africa as a whole, the challenge is to move from rhetoric to action. We can repeat the mistakes of the past or seize the opportunity for real transformation. The AU’s vision of establishing a Committee of Experts on Reparations presents an opportunity to integrate gendered analyses and resocialisation measures into the African Common Position on Reparations.
This is especially pressing as South Africa marks Women’s Month, a time that commemorates the courage of women who have fought systemic oppression and continue to demand equality.
Yet, the persistence of gender-based violence, economic exclusion and the failure to dismantle patriarchal norms demonstrate how far we still are from achieving substantive gender equality.
Reparations are not simply about remedying historical harms. They are forward looking and are about building a future that refuses to replicate past injustices.
As we honour the courage of women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956, declaring “you strike a woman, you strike a rock”, we must remember that their resistance was against the entire apartheid system in which racial and gender oppression were closely intertwined.
Today’s reparations movement faces the same choice those women faced: to accept injustice or demand transformation.
We must insist on a future where women’s dignity stands at the heart of South Africa and Africa’s story of justice and healing. Justice for Africa must mean justice for women.
Anything less betrays the transformative promise of reparations and dishonours the memory of those who sacrificed everything for freedom. DM