As South Africa marks Women’s Month, mental health counsellor Devan Moonsamy is challenging the country to rethink one of its most powerful descriptions of women: Imbokodo.
The phrase “Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo” — “You strike a woman, you strike a rock” — became synonymous with the courage and resistance demonstrated by the thousands of women who marched to the Union Buildings against apartheid pass laws in 1956.
But Moonsamy, CEO of The ICHAF Training Institute, argues that almost 70 years later, the symbolism of the “strong woman” risks being turned into an expectation that women should endure hardship without adequate support.
“The praise poem has become a job description,” Moonsamy says.
He argues there is an important distinction between honouring women for their strength and requiring them to be strong regardless of the circumstances they face.
When resilience becomes a burden
Moonsamy points to the concept psychologists call the Superwoman Schema — the belief that women must remain strong, suppress emotional distress, care for others and continue succeeding despite the personal cost.
Research by Dr Cheryl Woods-Giscombé has examined how this pattern among Black women can intersect with chronic stress and poorer physical and psychological health outcomes.
For Moonsamy, the issue has particular relevance in South Africa, where many women simultaneously carry financial, caregiving and household responsibilities while living within a society confronting high levels of gender-based violence.
He argues that women who continue working, parenting and caring for others may appear resilient while privately struggling.
“Resilience is not proof that someone is coping,” he says. “Sometimes it is evidence that nobody came to help.”
‘You don’t have to carry this alone’
Moonsamy also draws on South African feminist scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola’s work on the cultural narratives surrounding violence against women.
He believes society risks focusing on how successfully women survive difficult circumstances rather than addressing the circumstances themselves.
“A rock does not ask for help,” he says. “A rock does not need therapy. A rock does not need flexible working hours, paid leave, affordable childcare, functioning policing, trauma counselling or someone to say, ‘You don’t have to carry this alone.’”
Changing the narrative, he stresses, does not require South Africans to abandon Imbokodo.
Instead, he believes its original meaning as a declaration of courage, solidarity and resistance should be reclaimed.
From praising endurance to providing support
At home, Moonsamy encourages families to share caregiving, household responsibilities and emotional labour instead of assuming women will carry these responsibilities.
He believes employers should similarly move away from rewarding silent endurance and create psychologically safe workplaces where employees can ask for assistance without being perceived as weak.
Employee Assistance Programmes, flexible working arrangements and visible leadership support for mental wellbeing are among the measures he believes workplaces should prioritise.
At a broader societal level, he argues that preventing gender-based violence, improving access to mental healthcare, strengthening policing and supporting caregivers are essential to changing the conditions that require women to demonstrate extraordinary resilience.
“Real empowerment is not measured by how much suffering women survive,” Moonsamy says. “It is measured by how much unnecessary suffering we prevent.”
For him, the question during Women’s Month is therefore not whether South African women are strong. Generations of women have already demonstrated that.
The more difficult question is why strength has so often become the only acceptable state for women.
“Perhaps the greatest way to honour Imbokodo is not to keep asking women to be rocks,” Moonsamy concludes. “Perhaps it is to build a country where they no longer have to be.”
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