Nobel laureate addresses National Women’s Day commemoration, drawing powerful parallels between apartheid South Africa and the Taliban’s oppression of women.
Global champion for girls’ education and youngest Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai has made an impassioned plea for South Africa’s solidarity in the fight against gender oppression in Afghanistan, calling on the nation to use the legacy of its liberation struggle to support Afghan women and girls.
Speaking at the official National Women’s Day event at the Union Buildings in Pretoria — which commemorates the 70-year anniversary of the historic 1956 Women’s March, when approximately 20,000 women protested against apartheid pass laws — Yousafzai urged South Africans to help make what she termed “gender apartheid” a crime under international law.
‘It is not culture. It is not religion’
Reflecting on the Taliban’s repression since their takeover five years ago, Yousafzai highlighted the systematic erasure of women from public life under the ruling regime.
“Last year, your government declared gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster in South Africa and introduced legislation to combat it,” she told the delegation. “This year, the Taliban declared it legal for a man to beat his wife or daughter. For five years, the Taliban has been erasing women and girls from public life.”
She condemned attempts to excuse these abuses under the banner of culture or religion. “This is not culture. It is not religion. It is a system of segregation and domination. We must call the Taliban regime by its true name: gender apartheid,” she declared.
Drawing on South Africa’s legacy
Yousafzai, who is visiting South Africa for the second time, said she had returned because of the lessons its liberation history offered to women facing oppression elsewhere.
“My own fight as a child in Pakistan… in those dark times, I took comfort in reading about Nelson Mandela, how his courage outlasted those who tried to silence him,” she said, noting that she now understands the liberation struggle as a collective effort of ordinary people.
She also drew a stark comparison between her visit to Constitution Hill and the situation in Afghanistan. “Afghanistan is a place where women are sent to prison for the same defiance we honour here today,” she said.
‘We look to South Africa again today’
Yousafzai explicitly invoked South Africa’s historic role in the global fight against racial apartheid, calling for the same moral leadership to be applied to gender oppression.
“We look to South Africa again today to inspire the world with your courage and conviction to help us make gender apartheid a crime,” she said. “To show you, as you remember those who sacrificed for your freedom, you will also stand with your Afghan sisters who are suffering today.”
She noted that Afghan women are actively seeking inspiration from South Africans to combat Taliban oppression.
Ramaphosa: ‘Freedom of women is indivisible’
President Cyril Ramaphosa, delivering the keynote address, extended South Africa’s solidarity to Afghan women and girls being systematically excluded from education, employment and public life.
“South Africans know what it means when the law is used to determine where people may go, what they may learn, what work they may do and what place they may occupy in society,” Ramaphosa said, adding: “No culture, religion, government or ideology can justify reducing women to lesser human beings. The freedom of women is indivisible.”
Afghanistan remains the only country in the world that forbids girls from attending secondary school — a ban imposed in September 2021 and extended to universities in December 2022. UNESCO counts approximately 2.2 million Afghan girls now out of the classroom, with more than 70 decrees restricting women’s rights recorded since 2021.
A delegation seeking lessons in resistance
Yousafzai is backing an Afghan women’s delegation visiting South Africa this week, including lawyers, educators and human rights defenders, to draw inspiration from the country’s struggle against apartheid and strengthen the global initiative to end gender apartheid in Afghanistan.
“South Africans comprehend what it is like to live under a regime that uses legal frameworks to define who you can be,” noted Gaisu Yari of the Malala Fund. “They also know how to dismantle such systems.”
Yousafzai, who survived a Taliban assassination attempt in 2012 for advocating girls’ education and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, concluded with a message of hope. “We believe that we will all see a day like this one in Afghanistan.”
