✊🏾 For Women Everywhere ✊🏾

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October 29, 2022

**Message of condolence from President Nelson Mandela to my father on the day of my mother’s death from ALS in Johannesburg April 2008**

**My mother reuniting with Comrade Ahmed Kathrada, who spent 27 years in jail with Comrade Nelson Mandela and other Rivonia Trial accused. (Photograph taken by me in Stockholm, Sweden mid-1990)**. **On the right is Comrade Winnie Mandela (who along with Nelson Mandela was friend and comrade of the family dating back to the 1950s) and in the background on the left is my father**

**My mother addressing an anti-apartheid meeting in New Delhi mid-1980s**, **alongside the wife of the Amvassador of SWAPO of Namibia and Mrs. Margaret Alva**

For my mother, Zubeida Moolla, and for the countless women, names unknown, who bore the brunt of Apartheid, and who fought the racist system at great cost to themselves and their families and for women fighting for human dignity the world over

My mother meeting President Nelson Mandela upon his release from prison 27 years after they last saw each other. (*Photograph taken by me in Stockholm, Sweden, in the summer of 1990)*

My mother with President Nelson Mandela’s mother, alongside South African women of all races protesting the imprisonment of their loved ones who were thrown in Apartheid South Africa’s jails as political prisoners.

(Photograph from The Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa)

**My mother addressing an Anti-Apartheid** **meeting in New Delhi – mid 1980s**



✊🏾 For women everywhere ✊🏾




Pregnant, your husband on the run, your daughter just a child, a few years old,


they hauled you in, those brutish men, into the bowels of Apartheid’s racist hell.


They wanted information to sell your comrades out, you gave them nothing, these savage men, who skin just happened to be lighter,


You did not cower, you stood resolute,


you, my mother, faced them down, their power, their ‘racial superiority’, their taunts, their threats.


You stood firm, you stood tall.



You, like the countless mothers did not break, did not fall.



You told me many things, of the pains, the struggles,


the scraping for scraps,


the desolation of separation from your beloved children,


by monstrous Apartheid, by brutish men, whose skin just happened to be lighter.



You told me many things, as I grew older, of the years in exile, of the winters that grew ever colder.



You were a fighter for a just cause, like countless other South African women,


you sacrificed much, you suffered the pangs, of memories that cut into your bone, your marrow,


you resisted a system, an ideology, brutal and callous and narrow.



Yes,

you lived to see freedom arrive,

yet you suffered still,

a family torn apart, and struggling to rebuild a life,


all the while, nursing a void, that nothing could ever fill.



I salute you, mother, as I salute the nameless mothers,


the countless sisters,
daughters,
women of this land,

who fought,

sacrificing it all by taking a moral and principled and valiant stand.



I salute you,

my mother,

and though you have passed, your body interred in your beloved South African soil,


you shall remain, within me,
an ever-present reminder,


of the cost of freedom, the struggles, the hunger, the toil.



I salute you!

Viva the undying spirit of the women Viva!





For the brave women of South Africa, of all colours, who fought against racial discrimination and Apartheid and for women fighting for human dignity the world over