CHED Women's Day 2026

Story: Azraa Dawood

This Women's Day, the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) hosted a morning built around a single, deliberate refusal: “this would not be a concert”. Welcoming the room, Dean of CHED Professor Kasturi Behari-Leak set the terms early, every performance and every speech had been curated with intention to provoke reflection rather than to entertain. "You're not here to sit and watch and clap," she said. "You need to engage."The day's theme, "From '56 to '26," marked the seventy years since more than 20,000 women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the pass laws, and asked what their legacy demands of those who followed. What carried the morning wasn't the anniversary itself. It was the way pain, power and performance kept circling back into one another, across a keynote and three very different dance works, until they stopped looking like separate items on a programme and started looking like one continuous argument: that women have always spoken through the body, because the body was so often where the speaking was hardest to permit.

The weight carried in a body

Dr. Sandra Williams, Law Lecturer at CPUT, opened that argument in words. Her reflection on the 1956 march traced a direct line from that history to the realities women in academia navigate today through unequal opportunities, invisible labour, the strain of "balancing leadership with... many expectations that are often unequal." She grounded it in her own story, growing up in a township as one of eight siblings, activism as a student at UWC during apartheid-era campus lockdowns, and later personal struggle, including a serious health journey, that ran alongside her career. Her closing note was one of solidarity over competition, "We can't allow one woman's success to be our loss. There is room for all of us at the table."

That same weight, history lodged in the body, carried rather than remembered, returned later in Threads from Sari Sir, a shortened staging of Sharana Performing Arts' full production, presented with UCT's Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies and directed and choreographed by Saranya Devan. (The full-length production ran at this year's National Arts Festival). The piece uses the sari itself to carry its story: joy, longing, separation, warmth, new birth, protection, grief, and death. Its title comes from the phrase indentured labourers on colonial-era sugar plantations were made to utter to their overseers in submission, and the production doesn't look away from what that submission cost: the physical brutality, stigmatisation and emotional trauma inflicted on Indian women brought to South Africa as indentured workers.

What stayed with the room wasn't only that history's horror, but what sat alongside it, the promise of a better life that drove people to endure it in the first place, and the strength of the women who found a way to keep living, for those fortunate enough to do so. Told largely through non-Indian South African performers, the piece became a shared act of remembrance rather than a closed one, pain rendered legible to a room that hadn't necessarily inherited it directly.

Power, reclaimed in motion

If Dr. Williams and Sari Sir carried the day's pain, the two remaining performances carried its power, not as triumph over the pain, but as its companion.

Tierra Flamenca: Dancing Through the Flames, performed by Ché Adams, founder and artistic director of Tierra Flamenco Dance Studio, and Shae Behari-Leak, a Michaelis School of Fine Art graduate who has trained with the studio since childhood, opened the morning on exactly this note. Introducing it, Prof Behari-Leak told her own story of dancing through the final months of her PhD — describing the studio as a space where "a particular body type was [not] needed," where reclaiming the body wasn't a metaphor but the actual, physical work of getting through something hard.

The Ilingomso Lethu Dancers' performance, Drumbeats of Our Lives, made the same case in a different register: traditional movement and drumming as a living, ongoing form of expression rather than a museum piece. One facilitator's reflection on the piece captured what the day was asking of its audience throughout, to "understand what's going on" rather than "exoticise" the performance, to hear it as call-and-response, not spectacle. That instruction applied as much to the room as to the dance: engagement, not applause.

What the room carried out

The day closed with Reflections, Dialogue & Collective Wisdom, a facilitated session led by Associate Professor Bongi Bangeni and Ms. Sukaina Walji, using live polling to harvest the room's reflections in real time. What came back suggested the thread had landed: asked what had inspired them, attendees named stories, togetherness, movement, unity, vulnerability. Asked what legacy they wanted to leave, they named compassion, integrity, "women belong in academia," courage, "create space for others." Asked what they needed to get there: time, education, mentorship, confidence, structural change.

The morning ended the way it began, insisting on presence over spectatorship. A standing circle. A moment of silence. An instruction to make eye contact with someone in the room and simply say, without speaking: I see you.