Being called Imbokodo is a rite of passage for a South African woman and serves as the ultimate badge of honor, commemorating the fierce resistance of the historic 1956 march. But over the decades, our highest cultural compliment has evolved into an essential job description.
In this deep dive, mental health consultant Devan Moonsamy dissects the psychological machinery of the “superwoman schema” and questions the cost when a society stops admiring women’s flourishing and instead normalizes how relentlessly they survive.
The weight behind the myth
South Africa continues to have one of the highest rates of gender-based violence and femicide in the world, according to the latest crime statistics from the South African Police Service (SAPS) and research from the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC). More than 42,700 rapes were reported in the latest annual crime statistics, while researchers and public health experts warn that sexual violence and abuse remain significantly under-reported.
And yet, if she survives—if she buries her husband, raises four children on one income, cares for an aging parent, leaves abuse behind her, and still comes to work with lipstick—we call her a rock.
We call them Imbokodo. We mean it as the highest compliment. Maybe it’s time we asked ourselves if it has also become one of our greatest psychological burdens.
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What Imbokodo was always meant to represent
In 1956, twenty thousand women of all races marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest apartheid laws. They sang: Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo. “You hit a woman, you hit a stone.”
These words were never intended to describe how women should live. They were a warning to power. They declared that women would not be broken by injustice. The metaphor was outward facing, confronting oppression. It celebrated courage, solidarity and resistance.
Almost seventy years later, something has changed. The same words that once challenged institutions have quietly become an expectation that those very institutions place on women. The poem of praise has become a job description. Sometime between 1956 and today, resilience was no longer valued but expected.
The psychological burden that South African women continue to bear
Statistics South Africa estimates that about 42% of South African households are headed by women, while about 7.4 million women are the sole or primary breadwinners in their homes. At the same time, the Human Sciences Research Council found that about one in three South African women have experienced physical violence in their lifetime – more than seven million women. Many of these women carry another burden that receives far less attention: an escalating mental health crisis.
The South African Depression and Anxiety Group reports that it receives around 3,000 calls every day, while fewer than one in 10 South Africans suffering from a diagnosable mental illness ever receive treatment. In isiZulu, one of South Africa’s most widely spoken languages, clinicians and researchers have found that depression is often understood and expressed through culturally specific descriptions of suffering rather than a direct biomedical label.
It is often not spoken. It is simply worn. And maybe that’s exactly the problem.
What is the Superwoman scheme?
Every time a woman’s suffering is interpreted as evidence of her strength, someone else is absolved of responsibility for changing the conditions that cause that suffering. We celebrate perseverance. We admire sacrifice. We embrace resilience. But we ask far less often why exceptional resilience became necessary in the first place.
Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon.
They call it the Superwoman schema — the internalized belief that a woman must always appear strong, suppress emotional pain, take care of everyone else, and succeed regardless of personal cost. The groundbreaking research of Dr. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé linked this pattern to chronic stress, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and stress-related physical illnesses, including high blood pressure, obesity, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.
More recent research has found a similarly troubling finding: women who internalized the “strong black woman” identity most strongly reported significantly worse mental health outcomes than women who internalized it less strongly.
It turns out that strength can be psychologically costly.
The mental health costs of always being “the strong one.”
South African feminist scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola offers another perspective to understand this reality. In Female Fear Factory she argues that violence against women is borne not only by those who perpetrate it, but also by cultural narratives that make living with this violence seem normal or inevitable.
Viewed through this lens, the weaponized Imbokodo myth becomes deeply uncomfortable. It doesn’t stop women from being beaten. It just makes us admire how well they take the hit.
A stone doesn’t ask for help. A stone does not need therapy. A rock doesn’t need flexible hours, paid vacation, affordable childcare, functioning policing, trauma counseling or someone to say, “You don’t have to do this alone.”
This is precisely why the metaphor has become so useful to everyone except the woman who lives in it.
The costs are rarely a dramatic collapse. More often, it is the woman who continues to perform. She continues to work. She continues to take care of her children. She continues to care for everyone around her. She smiles. She keeps every appointment. She asks everyone else if they are okay. And all of this comes with the invisible biological consequences of chronic, unrelieved stress.
Resilience is not evidence that someone can cope. Sometimes it’s evidence that no one came to help.
None of this detracts from what Imbokodo meant – or what it should continue to mean. It deserves to be spoken with pride. It should remain a symbol of courage, resistance and the extraordinary contribution that South African women have made to the history of this country. But there’s a big difference between acknowledging a woman’s strength and silently demanding it. South Africa has blurred this line. And women pay the price through silence, through burnout, through illness and through shortened lives.
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How we women can support each other
To change this narrative, Imbokodo does not have to be abandoned. It requires the restoration of its original meaning.
HomeStop praising women just for how much they endure. Ask what support they need. Share care, emotional labor, and household responsibilities rather than assuming women shoulder these for granted.
At workOrganizations need to stop rewarding quiet perseverance and start creating psychologically safe workplaces where asking for help is seen as a strength rather than a weakness. Employee assistance programs, flexible work arrangements, and visible leadership support for mental wellness should become standard practice—not optional benefits.
As a societywe must stop celebrating resilience while tolerating the conditions that make resilience necessary. Preventing gender-based violence, improving access to mental health care, strengthening policing, and supporting caregivers are not acts of charity. They are investments in the well-being of our nation.
True empowerment is not measured by how much suffering women survive. It is measured by how much unnecessary suffering we prevent.
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The most important question South Africa needs to ask
The question South Africa has never honestly asked is not whether its women are strong. Generations of women have already answered this question. The real question is why we have made strength the only acceptable state. Perhaps the best way to honor Imbokodo is not to constantly ask women to be boulders. Maybe it’s about building a country where they no longer have to be.
A stone can support a house for a hundred years. But rock also erodes if nothing is done to protect it.
Words from Devan Moonsamy, mental health consultant and CEO of the ICHAF Training Institute, with additional reporting from the Women’s Health SA team.
