Zahra Joya, Rukhshana Media Editor-in-Chief
Strolling through the autumn streets of Johannesburg in South Africa, it’s refreshing to see the democracy emerging from a long, unfinished struggle against racial apartheid.
I accompanied a group of eleven Afghan women’s rights activists on a week-long journey to South Africa this month to learn from and share with those who have walked a similar path to the one we now face.
Over in Afghanistan, girls and women grapple with one of the harshest forms of gender apartheid ever seen. Still, their hopes for a future where they can fully participate in society remain solid.
South Africa and Afghanistan are culturally different and are distant points on the global map, yet they’re bound together by the wounds of segregation, struggle against oppression, and hope for change.
The harrowing parallels are evident. Just as apartheid laws deprived Black South Africans of basic rights, Afghanistan’s de facto rulers the Taliban have issued more than 80 decrees stripping Afghan women of even their most fundamental freedoms. These are invisible, yet rigid walls – this time built not around skin colour, but gender.
The Afghan women delegation included those who are fighting against the Taliban’s silencing of women across generations – activists, legal experts, storytellers, and educators. The trip aimed to share experiences and the pain of this fight against a new vicious form of apartheid in a place where the scars of discrimination are still etched on city walls.
Initiated by Malala Fund and building on Malala’s own visit in 2023 where she talked about gender apartheid, this journey became an opportunity for deeper reflection on the striking similarities between South Africa’s not-so-distant past and Afghanistan’s present reality.
From different continents and generations, women who had lived through South Africa’s racial apartheid gathered with those enduring today’s gender-based oppression in Afghanistan and grieved together, while spearking powerful words of resistance.
Inside the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the namesake’s words boldly displayed on the wall proved a source of inspiration: “Only you can free yourself.”
The Afghan delegation were all women who only a few years ago were lawyers, teachers, journalists, or artists in Afghanistan. Now, they are all refugees. We wept not just for what has been lost, but for what is still slowly being destroyed: the dignity of women.
In our meetings with South African activists and legal experts, we learned that women still suffer extreme gender-based violence with South Africa holding one of the highest rates in the world.
A former judge told us, “During apartheid, we said we’d deal with gender later. But when the regime fell, women were once again left under patriarchy’s rule.” She warned that justice without gender equality is impossible, and that women must prioritize their own voices.
“We have one of the best constitutions in the world, but now we have the highest rate of gender-based violence against women. This is not Islamic culture – violence against women exists in all societies,” she said.
Her words were a painful reminder of Afghanistan’s bitter reality. In my country, after 20 years of international military presence and nation building at the hands of hundreds of non-government organizations, women today have no right to education, no right to work, and even no right to appear in public spaces. All of this is happening in the 21st century, under the world’s silent gaze.
One South African activist told us, “During apartheid, we had a radio station called ‘Radio Freedom.’ We never stopped our voices. You must not stop yours.” This seemingly simple advice was a beacon of light for women living under suffocating repression.
In the past three years since Afghanistan’s democratically-elected government collapsed, Afghan women activists have travelled the multiple countries around the globe to meet with those with experience in these struggles. Everywhere they stop, they are told their struggle will be long. But no one can say how long it will take until we see results.
Today, Afghan women stand on the frontlines of the global human rights movement. They are victims of political games, but also a force capable of shaking the foundations of patriarchal tyranny. Yet this fight requires international solidarity. Just as racial apartheid did not end without global pressure, neither will gender apartheid, unless there is more than declarations and symbolic gestures.
Delegation of Afghan women’s rights activists/ Image:Supplied
In a world consumed by economic crises and with diminishing attention to human rights, a question keeps echoing in my mind: Will the Taliban one day be recognized as the founders of gender apartheid?
We walked through the streets of South Africa’s second-largest city Cape Town, a city once gripped by racial violence, now hosting Afghan refugees who have fled the gender-based brutality of their country. In one conversation, a woman said, “This city reminds me of Kabul, the sorrow, the fatigue, and the hope that still hasn’t died.”
During a visit to South Africa’s Constitutional Court Hill, an Afghan woman cried for what’s been lost.
“We were supposed to establish a constitutional court in our country too, but that dream was buried. We still live under Taliban interpretations of religion,” she said.
And then came a piercing remark from a legal expert: “What the Taliban are doing is not our culture – it is a crime. And no crime should be legitimized as culture.”
These words challenged the oft-repeated notion that the Taliban leadership is organic, more akin to Afghan culture than the freedoms supported by the West. But denying girls and woman an education and many other anti-women decrees enforced by the Taliban completely oppose widespread cultural practices in Afghanistan.
In Cape Town, a city where Nelson Mandela’s resistance brought renewed hope, I reminded myself that we cannot be complacent. Being steadfast in this effort is the only way forward. Our struggle is not only for Afghan women, it’s a fight for womanhood, for humanity.
If racial apartheid ended through resistance, global solidarity, and international pressure, why can’t the same spirit be applied to fight gender apartheid? Why, four years into Afghan women’s struggle, have nations still failed to acknowledge that what the Taliban are doing is not culture, but a crime?
As Sahar Halaimzai, Senior Director of the Afghanistan Initiative at Malala Fund, expressed during our time in Johannesburg: “We are caught between two imperialisms: one that punishes, and one that pretends to protect. Our repression is both internal and external – imposed by those who seek to erase us, and perpetuated by those who speak over us.
“Afghan women are treated as outsiders not only to their politics, but to their own cultures, and even to their own faith. But despite abandonment, despite co-option, Afghan women speak for themselves. Not in reaction, but in resistance. And in pursuit of something far more radical: the right to shape our futures on our own terms.”
In South Africa, we were reminded of a rallying cry from the anti-apartheid movement: “You strike a woman, you strike a rock.” These words, rooted in the 1956 Women’s March connect our struggles across time and geography. The Taliban – and every regime that fears women’s autonomy – knows this truth. That’s why they lock women behind doors, silence their stories, and ban their gatherings. They fear what happens when women rise together.
At Johannesburg’s Constitution Hill, we visited the women’s prison. I was shaken by the sight of four locks on the cell that held women – not two, not three, but four locks. It wasn’t just to prevent escape – it symbolized for me the deep-rooted fear that many oppressive systems have toward women’s power. They know that when women are aware and united, they can shake the foundations of injustice.
But it will take more than the Taliban effectively locking women in their homes to prevent their struggle. We still have our voices, and we are steadfast in raising them until we are heard. As one of the delegates observed: Four locks may shut a door, but they will never silence women.
