Bang Your Pot® – A Collective Call to End Gender-Based Violence
There are moments in a nation’s story when silence becomes unbearable. This truth runs through South African history, a history of curfews and protests, of courageous conversations about humanity, dignity, and the right to live free. Ours is a nation that refuses to be silenced.
Yet today, in a country where gender-based violence continues to steal lives, futures, and dignity, silence has, once again, become a second crime.
During the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence, we are reminded that words, however powerful, mean little without collective action. And collective action is something South Africans understand deeply.
The revival of Bang Your Pot®, a campaign born from South Africa’s own history of protest and solidarity, challenges us to turn awareness into accountability and empathy into action loud enough to shake indifference.
We know, instinctively, and through history, that the South African spirit is loud. When faced with injustice, we make noise. During the apartheid era, communities banged pots, not as performance, but as protest. That sound, echoing through streets and settlements, declared, ‘we will not look away.’ It reminded us that violence thrives in secrecy, and that silence is its closest ally.
Decades later, that simple act returns with new urgency. TEARS Foundation and the Soul City Institute for Social Justice
have joined forces to reignite Bang Your Pot®, not as nostalgia, but as necessity.
In a country where domestic violence rates remain five times higher than the global average, and where survivors still face systemic barriers to justice, the call to “make noise” is not symbolic, it is strategic. It demands that every citizen becomes a participant in the struggle for safety and dignity. To bang your pot is to refuse neutrality. It is to insist that the pain endured behind closed doors belongs in the public conscience.
Gender-based violence is not only about individual cruelty, it’s about the structures that allow it to continue. Corruption, indifference, and bureaucratic paralysis are its accomplices. Survivors are too often caught in loops of delayed dockets, inaccessible protection orders, and secondary victimisation at the hands of those meant to protect them.
To make noise, in this context, means to demand that our systems work, that every report leads to response, every survivor is met with compassion, and that justice is no longer a privilege of persistence.
But the fight cannot be left to government, organisations and service providers alone. Real transformation begins where people live, work, and gather. It happens when neighbours refuse to be silent, when schools teach respect as firmly as literacy, and when workplaces treat GBV not as a compliance issue, but as a moral one. It deepens when men and boys become protectors, not bystanders, and when communities act before tragedy strikes.
Each act of solidarity, each pot banged, is a reminder that we all hold part of the solution. Bang Your Pot® is not just a campaign; it is a collective alarm. It reminds us that awareness must evolve into responsibility, and that justice cannot rely on moments of outrage alone. It calls us to look beyond hashtags, to measure progress not by promises but by protection.
In every clang and echo, there is a plea: let this not be another season of speeches, but the beginning of sustained accountability.
For too long, survivors have carried the burden of breaking silence. It is time for all of us to share that weight. When we bang our pots, we honour those silenced, amplify those still fighting to be heard, and remind ourselves that silence is never safety.
The noise we make together becomes a rhythm of resistance, a rhythm that echoes through homes, schools, workplaces, and streets. It is the sound of a nation saying, in every language and every community, that we will not be quiet until justice is the norm, not the exception.
This 16 Days, we ask you to join us. Bang your pot, raise your voice, and take your place in the movement to end gender-based violence.
Together, we can turn noise into change.