This chapter looks at the untold and misrepresented stories of women in South Africa. The argument made here, is that the exclusion of “her story” distorts “our story” as South Africans, and weakens (if not defeats) our resolve to build a “united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa” (RSA, 1996), as our constitution calls on us to do. The chapter also calls on Freedom Park to offer a platform for women to tell their stories. A few suggestions are put forward on the actions that women can take in their continued struggle for gender equality in South Africa.

According to Jane Mufamadi (2018):

It is for this reason that we, as South African women, must tell our story for lessons to be drawn and tools to be sharpened for future battles. While it is true that “there is no such thing as the ‘voiceless’ […] [t]here are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably silenced” (Roy, 2004), as South African women we have been rendered voiceless, with our story not being properly and fully told. Our story is often tacked on as an addendum, a post-script, a flimsy mention or footnote in an otherwise supposedly bigger and more important story centred on male actions. Even that “tacked-on story” is not usually told from our perspectives, experiences or knowledge, but rather it repeats the perspectives of “others”, mainly in the “malestream” (a play on the word “mainstream” often used in current feminist discourse) and/or global media. As Maya Angelou (1969) argues, “[t]here is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside”.