It should be a Happy Women’s Day.

The mantra, "you strike a woman, you strike a rock", was sung and chanted by over 20000 women of all races back in 1956 as they marched to the Union Buildings on the 9th of August.

These brave women were marching to petition their grievances against the oppressive apartheid state and its pass laws that limited the movement of women, and black and brown people in general through the requirement to possess dompasses that limited where one could work or socialise.

They expressed their grievances in peaceful protest against the apartheid establishment, and male dominated society, that a woman does not belong in the kitchen, but has liberty to be whomever she wants to be, and should not have her movements regulated upon.

The same message is still being fought for by women in the present day, this is South Africa in 2020, but it resonates across the world.

The message of freedom of movement within their communities, without fear of being harmed or her body violated in sexual violence, in the physical or observational and without the undertones of sexist commentary, and the harshness of shaming her body or what she chooses to wear.

Noone should be dying because they were born into a particular gender.

The fight exists into corporate boardrooms, where she has to move upwards or sideways as she chooses, without the glass ceiling limitations, or the brick walls that prevent her lateral growth.

The women of today still need to be able to attain financial freedom, and this comes with the ability to have career and growth choices at her disposal, yielding to real and genuine emancipation. And patriarchal society should not hold her back from her freedom.

A lot needs to be done to address perceptions of inferiority, and women should not be seen as being of lesser ability or capacity, and the principle of equal work for equal pay must hold, and we must be a society that recognises excellence, regardless of gender.

In recognising our combined diversity, we should also adopt a change of culture and values. And we should value women as equal participants and contributors to our progress as humans, all across the world.

And so we should take a principled lesson, from imbokodo who marched for some of the justice that we are now in the midst of, and we should work towards the empowerment of all of us, all genders, and we should value the contributions of everyone who seek to make our country and its economy better for future generations to come.

If we are solemn, in our recognition of the 9th August as a landmark date in our country’s history.