OP-ED: Women’s Shutdown – Being a Black Queer Woman in South Africa Is a Daily Act of Survival

On 21 November 2025, South African women — joined by LGBTQI+ communities — staged a historic National Women’s Shutdown, withdrawing their labour, their spending power, and their participation in daily life. They aimed to highlight the country’s dependence on people whose lives are most threatened by Gender-Based Violence and Femicide. In this op-ed, MambaOnline’s Managing Editor, Nompilo Gwala, reflects on what it meant to stop for a day as a Black queer woman in South Africa — and why, for so many, simply existing is already an act of resistance and survival.

I walk through this country knowing my body is always negotiating danger. Being a woman is already risky. Being a Black woman is deadly. Being a queer Black woman? Sometimes it feels like I am carrying three bulls-eyes on my back, gender, race, and queerness, each one a reason for someone, somewhere, to decide I do not deserve to live freely.

Every day, I brace myself before stepping into the street. Not because I am paranoid, but because experience has taught me to expect the worst. The cat-calling from men who believe my silence is an invitation. The hands that reach for me without my consent. The insistence that I must smile, greet, respond, as if my refusal is an offence punishable by violence. And in South Africa, it often is.

Women here get killed for saying “no”, for wanting to leave, for daring to exist in a world that still thinks it owns us.

Today, as our nation finally declares gender-based violence a national disaster, I cannot help but think: what took so long? What more did our bodies need to show, how much more blood needed to spill, how many more names needed to become hashtags before we acknowledged what we already knew?

Fifteen women killed every day.
A femicide rate five times the global average.
A crisis so familiar it has become our morning news, our whispers at funerals, our private fears.

Today, I remember Uyinene Mrwetyana, a young woman who walked into a post office and never walked out. I remember the young Wits student who went onto Grindr hoping to explore his identity, only to meet brutality instead of safety. He did not call for this to happen to him. Uyinene did not call for this to happen to her. None of us call for the violence that finds us.

Yet here we are.

Today, in honour of the 15 women who die every day at the hands of men, the country was called to stop, to withdraw from the economy, to lie down for 15 minutes in remembrance. I had the opportunity to do so at the Fruit Basket Safe House, where Human Rights Defender Itumeleng Lets’oala welcomed us into a space where we could be free, queer, and held by community.

We gathered, queer refugees, township youth, activists, survivors, sisters, and for a few hours, we built a world that felt gentler.

We sang.
We danced.
We cried.
We remembered.

We honoured the people we had lost, the people who survived, and the people still fighting.

As we shared our stories, many in the group spoke about growing up watching their fathers beat their mothers, a painful reminder that the men we are taught to trust, rely on, and look to for protection are often the very ones who betray that trust. I did not grow up in a home where my mother was beaten, but listening to their experiences made me realise how deeply normalised violence has become in so many households, and how early many of us learn to fear the men around us.

One participant shared that she had been raped twice; walking in the street freely is no longer a reality for her. Itumeleng honoured her mother, who was brutally assaulted by her father. As I listened, I felt the heaviness of how deeply violence sits in our communities, not just as an act, but as a memory, a lesson, a scar.

As I lay down for those 15 minutes, I thought of a dear friend of mine who lost her life to GBV. Her laughter, her dreams, her future, extinguished by a man who believed he had the right.

But the story does not end there.
Because in that room, healing was happening.

And that is where the Art of Belonging lives, a project started by Itumeleng herself and powered by the Tekano Fellowship. Born from a vision of healing and resistance, the project positions cultural exchange as a site of community-building in the face of violence. It reminds us that solidarity is not an idea, it is a practice. It lives in care, in creation and in community.

By bringing together queer refugees seeking safety and township youth reclaiming African performance traditions, Art of Belonging becomes a living metaphor for the world we’re fighting for. It shows that belonging is not about fitting into a nation that often rejects us, it is about building one another up through struggle, empathy, and co-creation.

It transforms protest into an embodied ritual.
It redefines resistance as restoration.
It teaches us that art can be a language we speak when words are no longer enough.

And in this moment, when LGBTQ+ people continue to face brutal violence, “corrective rape,” hate crimes, and the constant threat of being targeted simply for existing, this solidarity becomes even more urgent. Queer bodies are not spared in this national disaster. We are part of the statistics, often erased from them, and always fighting to be seen in our full humanity.

So I ask:

What might freedom look like if we all stopped, not to retreat, but to listen, remember, and begin again, together?

Because we cannot survive on outrage alone. We need connection. We need healing. We need the courage to build communities that the state continues to fail. We need to remember that the struggle against GBV, including violence against LGBTQ+ people, is not separate from the fight for dignity, equality, and freedom.

Our liberation is intertwined.

Today was not just a shutdown.
It was a reckoning.
A mourning.
A protest.
A prayer.

And for me, it was also a reminder:
I am still here.
We are still here.
And together, we will refuse to disappear.