Mandela Day has always asked what you can do in 67 minutes.
This year, we are asking you to join us in ensuring that 67 minutes is just the start.

The Reality We Work Within

Tata Madiba gave us the blueprint. Now it’s our turn to carry the flag.
In a country plagued by trauma, displacement and instability, children experience unfathomable suffering.
We see daily how children are retraumatised by the very systems designed to protect them — the gap in
this safety net for society’s most vulnerable demands action by the average citizen.

Visibility Is Not Enough

The Story of Phiwe

Raped. Beaten. Left for dead. And with a growing life inside her belly. A life she didn’t ask for. A life she could not sustain.

Thembi found unspeakable cruelty at the hands of the nurses she thought would help her access the free and fair abortion she was entitled to. Scorned. Humiliated. Sent away.

Thembi walked back to the rickety mishmash of sheets that made up her home. Too afraid to tell anyone about her ordeal, she rose the next day at 4am, caught a taxi to town, and cleaned the house that paid for pap on the table each day. “Remember Thembi,” her employer told her, “my job is important. I can’t have you taking another day off
for the clinic.”

For days, the routine persists. Thembi wakes. The growing dread expands with every growing swell of her belly.

On her return home through the taxi rank, she spots a sign: PAIN FREE ABORTION. Call Now.

On a hot Saturday afternoon, when she isn’t needed, she pulls up that number. The voice on the other end assures her it’s a simple procedure. It will “dissolve” the baby. R200.

That evening, Thembi finds herself in a shack not far from her own, with a man not unfamiliar to her and a few tablets in her hand. With instructions on what to do and money exchanged, she is sent on her way — and reminded to stay close to somewhere she can bleed the dissolving pregnancy away.

What Thembi does not know is that to dissolve a pregnancy at this advanced stage is to birth a child.

Nobody told her. Nobody asked her permission.

Alone in the dark, a baby exits her body and her panic explodes. She’s not ready. She has no idea what to do. Too scared to look at what has come out of her in the hushed dark of that toilet, she grabs whatever she can find, conceals the baby, and runs.

A man searching for bottles to recycle comes across the pile. He calls the police. The media arrive. All the services that Thembi could not access at her time of need — they are there now. Searching for the evil woman who did
this atrocious thing.

Three years later, Phiwe lives in our home. The oxygen deprivation at birth means she has Cerebral Palsy.
Her story is not unique.

Phiwe was a media star the day she was found in a rubbish pile. But society’s commitment to keeping her alive after the hype died down — that calls for deep interrogation. Her rescue was one day in her life. Her sustenance thereafter is the key to her becoming an independent member of society.

This Mandela Day, we are calling on you to be part of what comes after the headline. To help ensure that children like Phiwe have the ability to rise from the circumstances handed to them — through consistent, ongoing, connected care.

Recent public discourse and global philanthropy engagement have brought South Africa’s child protection realities back into view. That visibility matters. It creates urgency and sharpens attention.

But attention alone does not hold a child for the duration needed to create meaningful intervention.

Behind every headline is a system under strain: placement capacity limited, care fragmented, and children moving through the space between crisis and stability without the thread of consistency that makes recovery possible.

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This is what care actually looks like.
Not a moment. A commitment
And this is what 67 minutes becomes when it is extended into responsibility

We are asking you to be the adult who remains.

Every act of kindness counts. Choose how you’d like to support Mandela Day.