Thursdays in Black thriving in South Africa

Van Rooyen: The WCC launched Thursdays in Black during the Decade of Solidarity with Women, but it petered out. I heard about it from you and others, and in 2013 I was in Geneva for a meeting of the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance HIV Task Group. I carried a bag of Thursdays in Black badges with me. We were sitting at round tables in the big hall and I walked around and placed badges on every table. Fulata Moyo was at one of the tables. She picked one up and said, “But this was our campaign – what are you doing with it?” And they took it back to Busan for the WCC 10th Assembly, where it was reintroduced and reactivated. Since then, the WCC has been very involved – staff wear black on Thursdays; we have Thursdays in Black ambassadors among key church leaders around the world. But what I would love to hear more about is how you became involved, how the Diakonia Council of Churches became involved, and how you kept the flag waving and the fire burning in those silent years.

Sprong: And they were silent years. I still cannot understand why it is so difficult to recruit people – especially women, because it’s women who are most often directly involved. My spouse, Kevin, wears black every Thursday and he wears a button when I remind him. However, on a Thursday, I don’t need to remind him to wear black. Whether we’re going walking or shopping or going out, we wear black.

Let’s go back to the story. For me, it came from the UK but the story of Thursdays in Black actually started in Argentina. From 1988 to 1998 it was a really bad time there – a repressive regime – where any woman who spoke out against violence risked being abducted. Many young women and men simply went missing. So, a band of women got together and said: We will wear black every Thursday until this stops. Eventually Argentina moved towards democracy and became less oppressive, but that’s where the campaign in fact began. A group of British people visited them and took the idea back to England, probably around 1988 or 1989. Then, in 1991, in Singapore, the World Assembly of Methodist and Uniting Church Women met and I was a delegate.

Van Rooyen: When was that exactly?

Sprong: Singapore, 1991. So by then England had already promoted the campaign for a couple of years. At the World Assembly, three women leaders of the British Methodist Women’s Network put buttons on all the tables, and one of them gave a short ten-minute appeal from the podium – calling women to stand up for those being abused. I went to find her over tea and said: in South Africa, at that moment, this campaign was desperately needed. She gave me a T-shirt – black, with “Thursdays in Black” printed on the front. On the back it said something like: “The Argentinian women started this, and we continue to uphold that all rape and violence against women is unacceptable.”

The original wording said “demand” but when I eventually went to work at the Diakonia Council of Churches, we changed it to “toward.” We felt the aggressive, demanding language didn’t quite suit Thursdays in Black. I remember sitting down one afternoon with Roland Vernon (who is now deceased), who was the communications director, and we brainstormed how we could re-promote this campaign! And we renamed it – “Toward a World Without Rape and Violence.” Gender-based violence is, sadly, a global epidemic! So the timeline is: 1988, it started in Argentina. From 1988 to 1990, the British women took it back to England. In 1991, they brought it to Singapore, where I was very taken with it. I had just completed a course, which opened my eyes to the plight of Black women and girls in South Africa, so I was very keen to promote Thursdays in Black. I brought back three or four spare buttons, and as soon as I got home to Johannesburg, I began promoting it. We even obtained a button machine and made our own buttons – we were not experts so they were badly done; the plastic kept coming off, but we made them nonetheless.

At that stage we were in Brackendowns, south of Johannesburg, and we had one of the strongest Women’s Auxiliary groups in the district. I got a few people wearing black – maybe three or four (out of a 60+ group). Everybody wanted a button but actually wearing black every Thursday was another matter. Even in my Bible study group, I would often be the only one in black.

I still ask myself: why? Because nothing seems to change. Women are still raped. Women are still killed. Women are still abused. But it’s the little bit that I can do. So, from 1991 I limped along. I started my training for the ministry in 2001 – I candidated in 2001 and was ordained in 2007 – and through that whole decade it was really the women’s organisation in the Methodist Church that was running with it, not the Methodist Church. In the whole district, from Alberton down to Standerton, there were probably five people who took it seriously. It’s almost as if even within the Women’s Auxiliary, people were so committed to serving the church – baking, preparing for Sunday worship, singing in the choir – but the social justice side was being neglected. Both Kevin and I believe we ministers haven’t done enough to educate our people into genuine community involvement.

Then, in 2009, a position opened at the Diakonia Council of Churches for a social justice coordinator. My master’s degree was in social transformation and feminist theology – it was a perfect fit. I think I’d been at the council about two years before Nombulelo (the director) one day said to me: “Why do you wear black every Thursday?” I thought, thank heavens – finally someone asked. So we sat down together and she said: “We need to do something with this.”

And so we did. We really got going then. The button-maker (this time a professional) must have printed more than 25,000 buttons for us. And at every single gender justice workshop, we promoted the campaign. Many Black women – especially the self-help groups working with Thembi – really took it on. In some rural communities, they had to have guards on the paths where senior girls walked home from school because they’d be stopped and raped. Thursdays in Black really got off the ground there, and they got quite a few men involved as well. This was from around 2011 to 2013.

Van Rooyen: And 2012 was when we met.

Sprong: Yes. I left the Diakonia Council of Churches late in 2013, so those last two or three years – 2011 to 2013 – we really pushed it hard. Regular orders of new buttons. And no matter which programme it was – self-help groups, social justice, economic justice, environmental justice – there was always space for Thursdays in Black, because social justice ran across the board. And then the Christian AIDS Bureau of Southern Africa came on board, and they really took it further and made it big. When did you start getting more involved with WCC?

Van Rooyen: Earlier than that, but I took the badges to Geneva in late 2012 or early 2013 – before the WCC 10th Assembly in 2013.

Sprong: Yes. Because when we were in Canada, when the Rt Rev. Richard Bott became moderator, he really promoted it – and I was intrigued. I said, “Finally we get recognition?” But that’s how it goes. During our nine years of ministry in the United Church of Canada, only a few people came fully on board.

Van Rooyen: People sometimes ask what it actually achieves. One of the things I’ve seen is that you create space, with your body, for discussion and interaction. I’ve had remarkable moments simply by wearing the badge. Once I was checking in at OR Tambo on a Thursday morning, and the woman at the counter looked up, saw my badge, and said: “My daughter’s husband abuses her. What should I do?” Another time I was sitting with a beer on a hot afternoon on a hotel veranda in Calitzdorp, and a young waitress said: “What’s this?” I told her, and she said: “Can I call my boss?” The hotel owner came over and told me that one of their employees had been in the queue at the magistrate’s office that very morning to get a protection order against her husband – and he had stabbed her in the queue. They wanted to know how to support her. That, to me, is the purpose.

Sprong: Absolutely! I don’t have many moments like that, but those ones make it worthwhile.

Van Rooyen: My husband, Jan, wore black on Thursdays for many years. You’ve never met him, but he looks like an Afrikaans boer (farmer in Afrikaans). He was working with the Foundation for Professional Development in a rural area of Limpopo on a well-clinic programme, and a gogo (grandmother) came from the back of the room and threw her arms around him. She told him she had been wearing black for 15 years and had never met anyone else doing it.

Sprong: Yes. Those moments matter very much!

Van Rooyen: So, I don’t think we can measure it. And I don’t think it’s my job to measure it. My job is to be consistent. My job is to be in solidarity. At the Christian AIDS Bureau of Southern Africa we developed a little pledge with bookmarks to anchor it – the WCC uses something similar and the World YWCA supports Thursdays in Black. I remember young women saying it gave them space to be open about what they faced, and to say: this is not right, I don’t have to accept this. I remember an older man in a workshop we were running who started crying when he spoke about his wife, about his loss and a young man watching him said to me afterwards that he had always looked up to this older man, and seeing him cry gave him permission to cry too. And that says something. You can’t measure how that young man will raise his son differently.

Sprong: Yes. And knowing that the seminary and subsequent synods promoted Thursdays in Black in the social justice space – that’s significant, because you know it continues down the line. Even now that I’m not at synod or at conference, it’s a campaign that’s been accepted by the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. It’s on their website. That continuity matters.

Van Rooyen: And being able to open the discussions – about unhealthy theologies, about toxic masculinity and femininity. This is not something you will ever measure in project outcomes to a funder. It’s not that kind of thing.

Sprong: Absolutely. It’s just very different. And sometimes we are simply at the place where somebody needs to hear someone compassionate, or someone who can give them the correct information. We updated our Diakonia leaflet three times in four years because referral information kept changing – the police departments evolved; many police stations really improved their systems for how they treated rape victims. It is so important to help someone find a doctor or a government hospital to have a rape kit done – to give them accurate information and to be compassionate. Not to tell them it was their fault, not to ask what they were wearing or why they were out alone at night.

Van Rooyen: Why were you drunk? Why was your skirt too short?

Sprong: Exactly. You never ask a man those questions.

Van Rooyen: If you wanted to say to a young person that they should become involved in this campaign, what would you say?

Sprong: I think I would say: this is about taking back our power. We live in a system that still doesn’t give women – especially young women – the freedom they should have. And for that freedom, we need to be safer. A campaign like this gives us the confidence to say: I know my rights. I know what to do when I am threatened, when I am abused, when I am slapped around. That would be one thing. The other thing I would say is: be in solidarity with others who think the same. You are not alone. There is a community, even if you can’t always see them.

Van Rooyen: There are hundreds of thousands of them in the world. You can say that.

Sprong: Yes. And there are some Pentecostals – mutual friends of ours who are promoting Thursdays in Black in charismatic and Pentecostal churches. It’s not only the mainline churches. So I think my message would be: there are people all over the globe promoting that violence against women is an anathema. Join us.

Van Rooyen: I love that. And I think it’s really global. I have a young man in Kenya who WhatsApps me every Thursday to say, “I am in black today.”

Sprong: Kevin and I used to do that in the early months when we moved to Canada – we’d check in with each other because we were working in different towns at that time. That kind of accountability and encouragement in community is very important.