Manifesto

June 2024

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Women Walk at Midnight in South Africa

 

Women walk at Midnight (WWaM) started in India in 2016. The South Africa chapter was initiated in 2022. 

 

Women Walk at Midnight (WWaM) South Africa engages in walking as a practice and a conscious social movement. In South Africa there is a growing recognition that the scale of violence against women and girls has reached epidemic proportions, yet somehow nothing changes. Women are simply not expected to inhabit public spaces, especially at night, and those that have to or want to are taught the norm through violent means. WWaM aims to disrupt the normalisation of this violence. It aims to disrupt this without putting more restrictions on female mobility. It aims to disrupt this by normalising women walking the streets at night.

 

WWaM, South Africa is about building a community, a space of safety for women,  where we can walk, sing, talk, breathe, exist and access the night without fear. We are not sponsored or funded by anyone. We do not seek permission to walk. There are no formal mechanisms of safety and no police protection. Women walking together are each other’s safety. 

 

We are not an organised protest. We do not carry any banners or signs, we do not raise slogans. We just walk together. And in this we find our first breath of resistance, our claim to our streets and to justice. We are not engaged in formal party politics but we walk in the frank acknowledgement that moving is political; women moving is political; women moving at night is political. We understand that the unequal ways that we move through the city, in turn, move us. We believe in the radical potential of movement to lead us somewhere better, individually and collectively. 

 

We are guided by Black feminist principles of the ethics and practice of care towards self, other, community and land. We understand care as a community practice of critiquing power and generating power. In recognition of this, we consciously strive to bring awareness to our walks, connecting gently but urgently with the histories and dynamics of each neighbourhood we walk in. Likewise, we reflect on the ways that our walking impacts the neighbourhoods we walk.

 

As there is no singular experience of being a woman in the city, but is simultaneously shaped by economic class, race, sexuality, and ability, we acknowledge that there is no single experience of a walk and that we may be called upon to change the direction–geographically or intentionally–of this group in the future.