Activists launch #PatrickMustFall campaign
Dozens of women from the Cape Flats protested in Constantia on Monday
About 50 women from the Cape Flats held a picket at the Constantia traffic circle on Monday morning. The Womens Day protest was to raise awareness for food security, unemployment and violence against women. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
Xoliswa Ngqola is a single mother of two children, aged ten and thirteen. She sometimes sends her children hungry to school. When they come home, she puts a pot of water on the stove to boil. They think their mom is busy cooking dinner. She tells them sheâs cooking beans and it will take a long time. âThat pot of water will cook the whole day until they fall asleep,â she says.
Ngqola is unemployed. She has been struggling to get ID documents for her children. As a result, the family does not receive child grants. She relies on her sister for support.
Ngqola joined about 50 women carrying empty plates and pots and placards, picketing at the Constantia traffic circle on Monday morning ahead of Womenâs Day. A large banner placed on the circle read, âEmpty promises, empty potsâ. Another said: âInequality is violence against womenâ. The protest was under the hashtag â#PatrickMustFallâ â Patrick meaning the patriarchy.
âSo many people are going hungry. So many women are struggling to keep abreast due to unemployment,â said Kashiefa Achmat, chairperson of the Housing Assembly for the Cape Flats.
Achmat said many families canât buy staples such as mielie meal and rice. She said unused land in communities should be turned over to farming.
âThereâs no job creation. Nothing is happening,â said Achmat.
Henrietta Abrahams, chairperson of the Bonteheuwel Development Forum, said they chose to protest in Constantia because âwe want to come to the privileged and let them know that they are part of supporting the system of capitalism and of patriarchy making them feel safe and secure against us, the poorâ.
âWeâre here to explain to these people that there shouldnât be a âthemâ and an âusâ ⊠Inequality is violent. Poverty is violent,â said Abrahams.
The protest was arranged by various community-based organisations on the Cape Flats, including the Security & Safety Patrol Delft, the Housing Assembly, the Bonteheuwel Development Forum, Hope for the Future, and the Food Sovereignty Campaign.
Next: Are judges crossing the line when they speak out?
Previous: Bodies are still missing after Durbanâs devastating April floods
© 2022 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.