This is not a rant. It's a love letter.

Sunrise, Fish Hoek beach, Women’s Day, 2025

It’s National Women’s Day. And I am tired of anger. I am tired of grief. I want to write about love instead.

Thirteen years ago, I wrote a roar of rage on this day, the anniversary of our historic women’s protest march on the apartheid parliament in 1956, and published it on my blog -- where, within 24 hours, it became the most widely read thing I’ve ever written. In this small pond at the tip of the African continent, it made me mildly famous -- or infamous, more accurately; it gave me access to multiple platforms, it brought me friends, and best of all, was leveraged into a fundraiser for Rape Crisis, at the time under threat of closure. And then I wrote another rant a year later. And another the next year. And another, and another. And so the years passed, with my original fury fuelled by the awful reality that almost nothing seemed to be changing.

I wrote what I now realise was a final extended scream of rage in 2022, in disbelief at how women’s rights and the battle for equality for all genders had been eroded around the globe over the past appalling years (the overturning of Roe v Wade was one of a dozen last straws for me). For the umpteenth time, I cyber-yelled at the men of South Africa (and the world): PUT DOWN YOUR FUCKING FISTS AND ZIP UP YOUR PANTS. And still I gnawed at this question: “Why do so many men hate women so much?”

I noticed a change: my rage was being subsumed by grief. Was it a consequence of ageing? I asked wise friends over breakfast this morning, and one said it was because so much has been lost, and we have to face the reality that we might never claw back the gains we fought so hard for, and which have been so summarily stomped on by the forces of evil. Yes, evil, because that is what is afoot in the world. How else does one account for at least two genocides rolling along mercilessly as the world sits on its hands? We don’t talk about the one in Sudan (except as a form of “whataboutery”), but all the noise about the genocide in Gaza and its horrors has made no bloody difference, it seems, so I’m not sure flagging the suffering in Sudan -- or anywhere else -- would change anything either. And like every other awful thing, genocide and warfare harm women and children disproportionately. I am terribly afraid that my faith in human beings might be permanently extinguished: one of my best friends describes us as “a failed species of monkey”.

We may have failed morally, failed abjectly in the project of recognising that all human beings have rights, failed even to refrain from fouling our own planetary nest. And yet, at the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card, there is love, raked from the ashes over and over again.

Exactly a year ago, I was writing a paper commissioned for a conference on the thirty-year anniversary of SA's first democratic election: my brief was to track the battle against sexual violence since those glory days of the new “rainbow” nation. I felt devastation and despair as I charted the towering losses stacked up against the paltry gains. But I was writing these words, sometimes weeping, in an office at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), where I had a residential fellowship for a semester. And something was stirring in me. I found I could breathe.

Rage is at least energising; grief is exhausting, and grieving takes time. Struggling with Long Covid after more than four years lost in the murk of this grim, joy-destroying condition, I could pause. I could replenish. But the practical support of the infrastructure paled in comparison with the emotional support now coming my way, at first tentatively, then in a stream, then in waves. There's a word for that kind of support: love. There is something about the care of strangers, people who reach out to us beyond the obligations of family, friends and neighbours, that is transformative.

I finished my paper, with support from the exceptional women (also grieving, also exhausted) who came to that closed conference; and with tendrils of affection and affirmation extending from my Fellows. Reading it now, I can see it's a good paper, even though the ground it covers is strewn with the salt and thorns of smashed hopes and ideals. My brain fog (such a deceptively mild term for a neurological condition that exactly mimics the early stages of dementia, according the UK's NHS) was clearing. The next few weeks were extraordinary, notably the day I woke and knew the Long Covid was gone. I wanted to run and jump and sing. I DID run and jump and sing. As the oaks put out tender leaves, vines unknotted, trees and wisteria vines unfurled into confetti and colour, I witnessed a metaphor for my own state every time I looked out my window into the idyllicly beautiful gardens.

And that was my cohort of Fellows' doing; they gave me back the gift of myself, lost for four and a half years. The political dynamics -- race, gender, class -- of my Edenic place of refuge -- were not perfect, but it was a place and a community that allowed me respite. Which is antithetical to the spirit of capitalism, which insists that we scrabble away madly on treadmills and up ladders.

Anger is often an odious thing, but righteous rage can be glorious: one of my favourite Biblical stories as a child was of Jesus chucking the moneylenders out the temple. Rage has kinetic energy. It travels, it galvanises, it purges. It is broad, its lens wide. Combined with a passion for justice, it can encompass crowds, multitudes.

But love focuses in on the individual, and it is nearly impossible to convey its power to a wide audience. I've tried many times to write a proper thank-you honouring the Fellows of my cohort (and the staff of STIAS). I wish there was a way to capture Bhakti’s passion, Kanika’s tenacity, Frida’s optimism; a day warmed by Danie’s terrible puns, Clare’s laugh, Seth’s smile, the merriness of Riël, the sheer splendour of Laye -- to name just some of them. But trying to convey how I feel about them one by one doesn't travel well: I can only describe their collective grace and generosity to me. It’s like those speeches at weddings or Oscar ceremonies, where the speaker sincerely thanks those essential to them, while the audience listens with goodwill, tolerance, even warmth, but remains excluded from the truth of the deep connections being described. Perhaps love, no matter how transparent, remains ultimately private.

The past year has had me considering love in all its forms, and its extraordinary power to enable rebirth, regeneration, hope. I have been reminded of the astonishing gifts it offers; in my case, sending a horrible disease packing. But in Western cultures especially, we duck and dodge intimacy and intensity, regarding them with suspicion, our narratives of love distorted by the overriding patriarchal “romantic” myths that assume there is always an agenda, that platonic friendships are grounds for distrust.

I fell in love with my cohort of Fellows (one more than others, but that came later); but there was an extra element that I loved most of all: that mysterious whole that was greater than the sum of the parts, something I referred to as the extra “invisible” Fellow: the one who walked alongside us all, and was a gift of that time and place and connection. Fairly early on, after my doctors had recommended I defer my fellowship, I told my Fellows that I could not bear to be parted from them: “You have given me back the gift of myself. At some point, I will grow accustomed to the sense of being reborn. But until then you have a woman on your hands who cannot feel the ground under her feet.”

I hope I gave back a little of the joy that place and those people gave me -- watching my lights come back on must have been like those wholesome videos of rehabilitated penguins being released back into the sea.

Right now, I find it impossible to engage with the suffering in the world -- babies deliberately starved, children trafficked in obscene numbers, women, gay and trans people battered, raped and murdered in even more obscene numbers -- and remain functional. Perhaps this is selfish or cowardly, or both.

And I sometimes think we live in a state of muted grief because we will inevitably lose all the people we love most; this is another reason we need to pay attention to that whole which is greater than the sum of the parts of everyone we love. Because that whole cannot be kept, but equally it can never be lost. 

The bottom line is that this Ranter of Note simply can’t feel rage at the moment; alas, not because the sources of that rage have dissipated. But is hard to feeI fury when I have never, in a life of many privileges and adventures, been as happy as I’ve been in the last year. And that has its own poignance. Women of my age and rickety health, beset by all the anxieties of aged parents and pets, eroded careers and scoured finances, do not expect this kind of rebirth. I am being taught that love is in fact the practice of loyalty, kindness and consistency; a folding together of tenderness and gratitude. That these things ARE love. It’s humbling.

The trouble is that love can teach us and transform us, but is not nearly as transmissible as anger. It’s easy to infect others with rage, whether of the blessed or the hateful kind. Love is much less infectious; it can be passed around, but that requires willingness to receive it, a capacity for celebrating the joy of others.

I am almost dazed nonetheless at how profoundly love can change us: I am no longer recognisable as the person I was a year ago, a sixty-something woman who took handfuls of pills daily, who struggled to climb stairs. Two days ago I took part in a nude women-only underwater photography shoot, in the kelp forests of the icy Atlantic, a rush of note; and as I signed the indemnity form stating that I was a “confident swimmer”, accustomed to ocean environs, I remembered again: nine months ago, I could barely swim at all. Now I am a wild swimmer, my doctors can’t stop grinning, and I live in an alternate universe, one in which I swim-stalk kingfishers and grebes, dance around the room, proofread physics papers, exult in sunrises and ocean spray.

So this Women’s Day, this month that usually grates my skin raw, nothing has changed -- except for me.

But how then do I mark this day and this month? How can we be more loving, more willing to be an agent of love? Perhaps we could encompass the invisible others of the world in that extra person, the invisible one who walks the road alongside us. At least we could try.

The joy-bringers. STIAS second-semester 2024 cohort.