This imagined letter places a composite speaker inside the thirty-minute silence of 9 August 1956. It draws on the events of the Women's March and the demands articulated by the Federation of South African Women.

Dear Mbokodo, if that is what they are calling you now

Something of your voice has reached me. Not the words. Seventy years carry only its shape, but enough to know you are arguing, and that some of the argument is with us.

Forgive the hand. I am writing this standing up.

We are on his steps. About 20,000 of us, they will say when they count us later, have come up this hill in our best clothes. This is something you should understand about us before anything else: we dressed.

Some are wearing the green, black and gold. Some have come in traditional dress. The Indian women are in white saris. There are babies on backs, and domestic workers have brought the children they look after. Women travelled through the night and arrived in twos and threes because even the form of our gathering is regulated.

We came carrying signatures.

He is not here.

The prime minister has refused to meet us. None of his senior officials has come in his place. So we place the bundles of signed petitions outside his office door. Our names are there, and beside them the marks of women who could not write...