President Cyril Ramaphosa, wearing a purple tie and a pink carnation, listens during the National Women’s Day commemoration at the Union Buildings on Sunday Kabul got a bloody nose at the Union Buildings on Sunday, with President Cyril Ramaphosa condemning the exclusion of Afghan women from classrooms, workplaces and public life. Ramaphosa was delivering the keynote address at the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Women’s March, held this year under the theme “empowered women empower nations”. Nobel peace prize winnerMalala Yousafzaiwas the guest of honour and also addressed the commemoration.
Yousafzai was 15 when the Taliban shot her in the head on her school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley in 2012, for insisting that girls be allowed to go to school. Yousafzai, who won the Nobel prize two years later, said the women of 1956 had inspired her own campaigning, and that their example was the reason she had now come back to South Africa. Afghanistan is the only country in the world that forbids girls from attending secondary school.
The Taliban imposed the ban in September 2021, a month after seizing power as the last US troops left, and extended it to universities in December 2022. UNESCO counts about 2.2 million Afghan girls now out of the classroom because of it, and have recorded more than 70 decrees restricting the rights of women and girls since 2021. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned in April that Afghanistan stands to lose more than 25,000 women teachers and health workers by 2030 if the restrictions remain, and that women’s share of civil service jobs had already dropped from 21% to 17.7% between 2023 and 2025.
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Ramaphosa said the campaign to silence Yousafzai had produced the opposite result. “A cruel ideology tried to silence you, but you rose to become one of the most strident voices for the emancipation of women in our world today,” he said.
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