Poem: An Ode to Warrior Women.

Aug 25, 20222 min read

09 August 1956 - a memory that cannot be forgotten, erased or even blotted out from our public

consciousness. It played a massive role in exerting women to become increasingly visible

in the struggle against the apartheid regime.

Inspired by their resistance, Mbokodo Aesthetics - a series of images commemorating South African Women's Day- does not necessarily celebrate the recollection of the 1956 women's activism but their force that the regime had to recognize.

Model Oneeleng Mmolawa is shot by Johannesburg-based photographer Tshepo Mogopodi and styled by creative Mothupi Kgatshe in the backdrops of their Jo'burg neighborhood. Aesthetically crossing the borders between football and fashion, Mbokodo Aesthetics cringes from the state of women in political activism but rather to a creative sphere that imagines them outside the boundaries that assert their voice. Counter-attacking and tackling male-dominated spaces. Glorifying the athletic garments that society deems for men only.

WARRIOR WOMEN

By Mothupi Kgatshe

For Mafeking, Mvubelo, Motlhakoana, Matomela, Mkhize, Ngoyi, Nyembe, Sisulu, and Gxowa

They built an army so strong the townships started decaying twenty thousand strong & many before them, the backbones of azania mothers, women from all walks of life, armed with nothing but vocabulary.

A militia of women so strong, ravishing. ravaging raging war, waving & waging, the depth of their wounds is swallen wounded to the core, exhumed from the lifeless corpses in their possession.

The autopsy is impolite. rude. ruthless. because it decreased the deceased & departed from the burden of mortuaries

The patriarchy starved to death. colossal tears flooded their sewage-ridden streets. Warrior women fought teeth & nail with them.

Looting their library and garden.

Gentrifying their genitalia for them, deconstructing their vasectomies for them, then neglect and dissolve their DNA molecules.

Genocide their dispensary inside their tiny bodies.

Sing yourself a eulogy from exile. They will sing too Let it fill their voids, sung in the anguish of their revolution lungs filled with Stuyvesant smoke.