Thank you dear Khairunnissa for asking me to participate in the B & W photo challenge, which started in Turkey as a campaign against femicide and violence against women. Without using the hashtag, I would love to celebrate kick-ass women of color from the global south.
This is Sizani Ngubane, a South African woman.
‘Sizani Ngubane is a veteran South African activist, who has dedicated her life to promoting gender equality and fought for women’s and indigenous rights.
She was once stabbed, slapped with a gun, and hit by a speeding car, but all these threats on her life did not deter her from working for women’s land rights.
Growing up during the 1950s, during the apartheid era, her father worked in Joburg as a migrant worker while her mother worked as a domestic worker.
She started helping her mother cater to her siblings at age six. At 10, her family was forcibly evicted and her father committed suicide three years later.
Ngubane recalls the painful memory of her mother losing her land ownership because she was a woman and had no son to hand it down to.
Her mother was earning little so Ngubane dropped out of school so she could get a job to ease their financial burdens. As a result, she never received any proper or formal education.
She commenced her human rights career as an activist with the ANC before becoming the Provincial Coordinator of the SA Women’s National Coalition in 1991. She steered research on rural women and contributed to the formulation of the Women’s Charter for Effective Equality in South Africa.
Her contribution was instrumental to build the section on rural and indigenous women of the Bill of Rights within the South African Constitution, adopted in 1996.
Along with three other women in 1990, Ngubane started an organization called the “Rural Women’s Movement” to help women who battled with land issues, women’s rights violations and more.
According to reports, Rural Women’s Movement is now a coalition of some 501 Community Based Organizations with a membership of approximately 50,000 women, working both at a grassroots, national and international level.’
