The day before Women’s Day, Cape Town media showed images of women protesting against gender-based violence holding aloft banners that read #PatrickMustFall. Who is Patrick? I wondered. Intrigued, I googled the hashtag. Grassroots news agency, GroundUp News, had the answer. ‘Patrick’, it reported, stands for ‘Patriarchy’. The women were protesting against ‘the patriarchy’ and food insecurity.
Other women posting on social media platforms questioned if Women’s Month wasn’t a misnomer. Should it not be End Patriarchy Month, they asked, wondering what was to celebrate as another teenager died in gang crossfire and the identity of a murdered 15-year-old whose body was stuffed into a wheelie bin was revealed. MTN SEA vice president Yolanda Cuba posted a video on Twitter, the agony clear on her face, after the mass rape of eight women taking part in a video shoot outside Krugersdorp. Enough is enough, she said, echoing millions of women across South Africa.
Of course we should pay tribute to those 20 000 women who marched on the Union Buildings in 1956, to protest against the extension of the pass laws to women. And we should celebrate the quite extraordinary achievements of women in our country in so many fields and disciplines. We must celebrate our Constitution and the rights it affords us all. We celebrate the role models who inspire us, the activists who fight for us, the sportswomen whose achievements lift us, the pioneers and entrepreneurs who are clearing the way for others to follow. But we cannot forget the millions of women, stuck in an endless cycle of poverty, often accompanied by violence, who cannot see past simply surviving each day.
The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
It’s those ‘little bits of good’ that create pools of light in what can often seem like a dark time. My inbox is filled with news from media companies doing their ‘little bits of good’ all over the country. In August, I often find out about women I’ve not heard of who are doing extraordinary things (and I wonder why our news media isn’t covering those stories as a matter of course).
I celebrated hearing that Quote This Woman+ received $50 000 from the Google News Iniative to boost its platform promoting women expert sources for newsrooms across the country to access.
And from a media perspective, The Media gets a chance to hear from women in our industry, and learn from their experiences. In this, the second issue of Women in The Media, we loosely explore thoughts around skills, the skills we have and the skills we might need in the future. Thank you to all our contributors who generously gave of their time and their expertise.
The Media.
Got to love it.
Glenda
