Lilian Ngoyi

Lilian Masediba Ngoyi was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on the twenty-fifth of September 1911. She worked as a nurse and then as a garment-factory machinist; in 1952 she joined the African National Congress Women's League. By 1956 she was its president.

Her defining act was the Women's March of the ninth of August 1956. With Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, and Sophia Williams she led a procession of approximately twenty thousand women of all races — the largest demonstration the apartheid state had yet seen — to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the seat of South African executive power. They came to deliver fourteen thousand individually signed petitions opposing the extension of the pass laws to African women. They sang the song that has become the anthem of South African women's organizing: "Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo" — "You strike a woman, you strike a rock."

She was the first woman elected to the executive committee of the African National Congress. In 1956 she was one of the one hundred and fifty-six defendants at the four-year-long Treason Trial. From 1962 onwards she lived under successive banning orders that confined her to her home in Orlando West, Soweto. She was forbidden to attend gatherings, forbidden to be quoted, forbidden to leave the magisterial district of Johannesburg. She lived under banning for nineteen years.

She died at home in Orlando West on the thirteenth of March 1980, age sixty-eight. She had been banned until the day she died.

The ninth of August is observed in South Africa as National Women's Day in honor of the 1956 march she led.

She is honored here as the rock the apartheid state struck.