A Country on Pause: What the G20 Women’s Shutdown Reveals About South Africa’s War With Itself
VAGUE CREW Lead Karina examines how South African women used the 2025 G20 Summit to stage a national strike, exposing the crisis of gender-based violence.
On Friday November 21, South Africa attempted something the world has never quite seen at this scale: a national women’s shutdown. A country paused in mourning, in fury, and in refusal. As G20 leaders gathered in Johannesburg, tens of thousands of South African women, gender-diverse people, and allies downed tools, left workplaces, flooded streets, stayed home, or turned their avatars black in solidarity. “A day without us,” organizers called it. A day dedicated to revealing what happens when the backbone of a nation stops absorbing its pain.
This was the overspill of a pressure cooker decades in the making: one where gender-based violence (GBV) has become so structurally embedded, so widely acknowledged yet so insufficiently addressed, that South Africa today is often described as one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman. But to frame the shutdown only as a protest would be to miss a much deeper diagnosis: led by local nonprofit organization Women for Change, the demonstration held a mirror up to the state, the economy, the culture, and the international audience watching from behind bulletproof G20 barricades.
You see, South Africa’s femicide crisis is nothing new. The statistics — devastating and repeated so often they risk losing sight of the very real lives behind them — tell us that one woman is killed every three hours. That studies consistently find extremely high rates of domestic violence against women. That queer and trans South Africans face daily (and often deadly) hostility. But data rarely captures the actual texture of everyday life: the WhatsApp check-ins (“did you get home safe?”); the keys clutched between fingers on the walk to the taxi rank; the quiet negotiations and mental logistics that shape the decisions women make about how they exist in the world from childhood through adulthood.
The shutdown was a reclaiming of this narrative. A deafeningly silent reassertion of the specific, lived realities of women too often obscured by political platitudes. But it was also a refusal to be exceptionalized. South African women don’t want to be ‘resilient’; they simply want to live.
“South African women don’t want to be ‘resilient’; they simply want to live.”
But what made today extraordinary was the timing. While world leaders discussed global economic recovery, climate transitions, AI governance, and trade, host nation South Africa was staging a mass refusal of labour, presence, and silence. On a day where South Africa was courting a global audience of prime ministers, presidents, multinational investors, development banks and tech leaders, the shutdown proved that national reputation does not supersede national safety. That South Africa’s “global leadership moment” cannot be allowed to mask its systemic failures that affect women’s lives with catastrophic consistency.
The protest’s organisers used the G20 platform tactically, dragging GBV directly into the centre of political conversation to make it impossible for diplomats to praise South Africa’s economic potential without acknowledging its ongoing human crisis. The message was not “help us,” but “you’re witnessing this — do not pretend you didn’t.”
The economic argument of the shutdown was just as compelling. The absence of female labour revealed the breadth of invisible labour that sustains a society — from office work to caregiving to emotional maintenance. On this one fateful day, those systems sagged. Offices slowed or stalled completely; service industries operated at half-capacity; and schools braced for absences. This slowdown illustrated what policymakers often avoid: GBV is not just a social issue. The cost of domestic and sexual violence can also be measured in healthcare spending, lost wages, interrupted education, reduced participation in the labour force, and the erosion of national productivity. Studies estimate that GBV drains billions from the economy annually, though the true figure is likely much higher than that.
The shutdown put that cost in the spotlight. If violence limits women’s participation every day of the year, a national refusal to participate thereby forces the question: what would South Africa look like if women were actually able to live and work without fear?
Culture — from music and film to fashion and social media — has long been a site where South African women process, express and politicise their experiences of violence. Naturally, the shutdown drew heavily on that logic: collective mourning, chanting, protest aesthetics, hashtags and performance. Artists and creators used the day not just to participate but to translate: documenting marches, publishing testimonies, releasing art, staging interventions in digital space — acts of political memory, ensuring that the shutdown lived beyond the headlines.
Yet culture can also obscure: South Africa is a country that knows how to produce beautiful images of the struggle; something international journalism routinely romanticises. But the shutdown resisted aestheticization, demanding instead that we look at GBV not as part of South Africa’s ‘identity’ but as a state failure requiring structural intervention, not poetic outrage or retouched melancholy.
And yet, the government’s reponse has been too familiar, too late with the usual predictable monologues: acknowledgement of the scale of the crisis; renewed strategies; commitments to action. “We stand with women.” “We hear you.” “This cannot continue.” But South Africans have heard this all before. The National Strategic Plan on GBV, launched to great fanfare in 2020, has since suffered from inconsistent implementation and chronic underfunding. Police responses remain inadequate; conviction rates remain low; survivors continue to report hostile or dismissive treatment. Shelters struggle. Prevention programmes sit under-resourced. High-profile cases fade quickly from public conversation.
The shutdown therefore served as an indictment of this familiarity. A refusal to accept what women’s rights activists describe as “government by press release”: symbolic commitments unsupported by structural investment.
“Police responses remain inadequate; conviction rates remain low; survivors continue to report hostile or dismissive treatment.”
What made the shutdown potent is that it framed women not as victims, but as an electorate: a body of citizens whose economic, political, and cultural power is measurable and non-negotiable. It was a reassertion that the state must treat GBV with the urgency of a national disaster, not a social inconvenience. Unlike what the word suggests, the shutdown was not the endgame but a beginning: a recalibration of tactics, a resetting of national discourse, and a directive to policymakers that GBV is not a circumstance; it is the issue.
So what comes after a standstill? How does a country maintain momentum when the problem is centuries deep? What forces political will to evolve from performance to policy? If the shutdown proved anything, it’s that the public no longer accepts GBV as an inevitability. South African women have long been the backbone of the democracy movement; but today, they demonstrated that they are also its conscience. The world may have tuned in to watch South Africa host the G20. But history will forever remember today as the day the country’s women demanded it finally stop and confront what it has failed to move for far too long.
credits
words — karina so.
design — karina so.
