Welcome to Womanity Women in Unity, join us for our new year broadcast with a compilation of voices from female leaders in politics, the judiciary and medicine talking about aspects of their journeys.

Our first guest in this feature is South Africa’s Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube, who shares her passion and vision for transforming education in South Africa, impacting the lives of 13,500,000 learners. Drawing inspiration from her upbringing in a typical South African household, raised by her grandmother, Minister Gwarube reflects on her grandmother’s influence as a trailblazing feminist whose relentless pursuit of quality education shaped her life. Many South Africans straddle multiple worlds, such as living in a village and schooling or working in a city.

Our next guest, High Court Judge Jacqueline Henriques demonstrates how law and policy can be used to drive change that supports and protects the rights of women. She highlights some of the recent amendments to domestic violence legislation, such as stricter bails imposed on persons charged with domestic violence offences and harsher now prescribed for offences related to gender-based violence. The Act has expanded its definition of what constitutes domestic violence, encompassing physical abuse, spiritual abuse, economic abuse, controlling behaviour, harassment, intimidation, elder abuse, and related person abuse to name a few. The Act now also requires the community to play an active role in stopping the scourge of domestic violence it is mandatory for the public to report incidences or reasonable suspicions of domestic violence, and also criminalises the failure of a person to report such abuse.

Closing today’s programme is orthopaedic spine surgeon Dr Lusanda Bomela (women account for just 5% of all orthopaedic surgeons in South Africa). Dr Bomela shares how her interest in the spine, coupled to the fact that few women take up this area of specialisation motivated her to pursue her studies in this field. One of her hopes is that she sets an example to encourage other women to take up orthopaedics and specifically spine as a specialisation.  Medicine can be a demanding career choice, but this profession does not preclude women from having a family life. Dr Bomela notes how having the right support structure in place enables her to be a spine surgeon, mother, wife, mentor and teacher. She reflects that it is not possible to be everything to everybody all the time but with a team ethos and good communication everything is doable. Dr Bomela is passionate about learning and has a deep desire to share education with others, which is part of her maternal philosophy, she believes that if we have a skill it must be passed on or used to better someone else. We have a responsibility to empower the next generation by imparting what we know to them, both in terms of skills and enlightenment. She tells us how her grandmother used to walk her mother to school 20km away for the sake of education, and years later part of her grandmother’s legacy was establishing a school 500m from her house, so no children in the village had an excuse not to be educated.

Happy New Year from Womanity wishing you peace and prosperity in 2025.