Women's Month is usually a time to reflect on South Africa's progress in addressing gender issues, and on how much remains to be done. But now, as the country turns to celebrating Heritage Month, two postgraduate researchers at Stellenbosch 肆客足球 (SU) are pushing these conversations further.
Lesedi Itumeleng Mashego and Thabolwethu Tema Maphosa are master's fellows at the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ), led by Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Both are pursuing MA degrees in Psychology, and their research sits at the cutting edge of how gender and identity are understood. Mashego interrogates black womanhood through mother-daughter narratives; Maphosa uncovers how liberation leaders defied stereotypes of black manhood.
Together, their work enters into dialogue about strength, vulnerability and what it means to repair humanity across generations.
Questioning the 'strong black woman' trope
Mashego was born in Pretoria and raised on the East Rand. Her father, Mpho, is a pharmaceutical director; her mother, Monica, a professional nurse specialising in midwifery, who often works 12-hour shifts in an overburdened public hospital.
“She'd come home exhausted and still get household chores done," Mashego recalls. “At the time, I thought that's just what mums do. Later I realised how taxing it must have been for her."
None of the women in her family showed the other side of that endurance – the cracks, the exhaustion, the limits. It left Mashego with a gnawing question: Is the 'strong black woman' identity chosen, or imposed?
She wanted to know what lies beneath this label. “We celebrate it, but my research asks: What does that strength cost? What does it mean for the individual woman and for society?"
So, she is making that the focus of her master's study. She is interviewing black women aged 18 to 29 about their relationships with mother figures. She calls her approach an “empathetic critique" – not dismissing strength but asking what it costs when women are only appreciated for their ability to endure.
Her scholarship is “very personal," she says. “As I've grown, I've come to see my mum not only as my mother but as a human being with her own limits. That realisation shaped my work."
Women's Day in South Africa goes back to the pivotal moment on 9 August 1956 when around 20,000 women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest apartheid pass laws. Their rallying cry was “Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo" – you strike a woman, you strike a rock.
But Mashego is wary of this metaphor. “A rock is a thing, something you can chip away at, reduce to rubble. It carries the idea that black women can endure anything. But we can break. We should also be seen as soft and gentle, as human beings who need care and protection."
She connects this to South Africa's wider crisis of gender-based violence. “We have a history of violence, and violence against black women in particular. Think of the rape of women who were slaves in the Cape. That history has been normalised, carried through colonialism and apartheid, right into the current era."
Mashego's research also intersects with the xenophobic politics of today. Sparked by stories her mother shared from her work with patients, she did her honours on pregnant migrants from the rest of Africa who are scapegoated in a health system under strain.
She considers the anger expressed through Operation Dudula – a vigilante campaign that has mobilised protests against foreigners – misdirected. “To bar women from medical care because they are immigrants is inhumane. The problem lies in policy and provision, not with the patients."
Her feminism, she stresses, is not about pitting women against men. “I grew up with a loving father and supportive brothers, and I have a caring partner. I know not all men are violent. But many women face violence. What we need are honest conversations between black women and black men, because both carry histories of violence. Without that dialogue, the cycle will continue."
Her message to young women? “Embrace softness. It can coexist with strength. Don't let society harden you. Treat yourself with the same grace you give others."
Excavating tenderness in black masculinities
For Maphosa, the other side of the coin is rethinking what it means to be a black man. His master's explores “post-patriarchal masculinities" through the lives of liberation leaders Robert Sobukwe and Joshua Nkomo.
Sobukwe is usually remembered as the uncompromising founder of the Pan Africanist Congress in South Africa; Nkomo as a nationalist leader in Zimbabwe. But Maphosa searches for moments when both stepped outside the mould.
He says Sobukwe once wrote to a friend that he was “not in the emotional space" to read a novel she had sent him in prison. And that Nkomo wrote of sharing his wife's tears at being excluded during independence celebrations.
“These moments show a tenderness that is rarely acknowledged," Maphosa explains. “Patriarchy tells men emotions are weakness. But here were leaders whose vulnerability was also part of their strength."
That has personal resonance for him. “I grew up as a very emotional child, the last-born, connected to my feelings," he says. “I was often bullied, and at some point, I learnt that as a man I wasn't supposed to cry. But for my mother, crying was never a problem. She always said, 'If you cry, your heart becomes lighter'."
Maphosa's father died when he was ten. He grew up especially close to his mother, Mildret. When she lamented having been given only an English name, not a Ndebele one, he gave her a second name: Gugulabazali, meaning “the one treasured by their parents."
It was his brothers, pooling their resources, who made it possible for him to go to university in South Africa – an opportunity he says he could never have imagined as a child growing up in a Bulawayo township.
Being in South Africa is complicated for Maphosa. “I have a sense of connection … until I produce my passport," he says. Xenophobia has not targeted him directly, but it makes him anxious about his academic future. He has found solidarity in the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, which rejects colonial borders.
Maphosa has published poetry in Medium and is also an imbongi (praise poet). He thinks culture is dynamic, not static. “Colonisation tried to arrest us in a single image. But being an African is not one thing. I refuse the single story."
His honours thesis at the 肆客足球 of Cape Town was on men and emotion – how they deal with breakups. He coined the concept of “patriarchal surveillance": the way men always feel watched, even when no one is there, and conform to rigid codes of masculinity.
Now, for his master's, he asks whether moments of political upheaval can open space for alternative masculinities – not the dehumanising “icon-messiah" or rebel, but the ordinary uMuntu (person).
He says his supervisor at SU's Department of Psychology, Prof Kopano Ratele, has become “the father figure I never had." This mentorship sharpened his resolve to imagine alternative masculinities.
Maphosa's scholarship is inseparable from his life. “I can't be writing about tenderness and then be emotionally abusive to others. Even with my friends – men, women, queer people – I try to model a post-patriarchal framing."
His message to young men? That another world is possible. “Patriarchy isn't inevitable. I think the assumption that our cultures are inherently patriarchal is wrong."
Parallel struggles, shared themes
Placed side by side, the two studies mirror one another. Mashego interrogates how women have to be strong but are nonetheless made to suffer; Maphosa interrogates how men are locked into heroism that paradoxically constrains them. Both want to salvage humanity from gender roles imposed by tradition.
?AVReQ, they both say, gives them a sense of belonging. “Here you're not treated as a junior fellow," says Maphosa. “People respect your ideas." Mashego agrees: “It can be isolating to do a master's, but here people check in on you as a person, not just as a student."
Both have already stepped into leadership. Mashego has served on house committees and the SRC, and has won prestigious scholarships. Maphosa has presented internationally and published in the British Journal of Social Psychology.
What unites them is a determination to move beyond critique to imagination. Mashego envisions a feminism that affirms softness as much as strength. Maphosa insists that alternative masculinities can be excavated from history and embodied today.
Maphosa recalls Steve Biko's words in I Write What I Like: “In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift – a more human face."
- AVReQ is launching a new interdisciplinary MPhil in Violent Histories and Repair in January 2026. The closing date for South African applicants is 31 October.
- CAPTION: Lesedi Mashego and Tema Maphosa. PICTURES: Ignus Dreyer/SCPS?
