I was dreading Women's Day -- hell, the whole month -- this year. Here we were, the 60th anniversary of the historic women's march on the Union Buildings barrelling down on us, and almost every single thing about the status and treatment of South African women that's had me frothing at the mouth for decades is so firmly entrenched, it feels like it's been set in concrete.

Right now I'm out the country, which has been an effective way of dodging the usual infuriating, patronising, tone-deaf, saccharine, sexist, and generally asinine things that government, media and corporations do and say at this time of year. In case you aren't quite sure what I'm referring to, see Rebecca Davis's savage pink list here.

But for the first time in a long time, I feel a little wriggle of hope. Why? Because even on another continent, it's been impossible to miss news of the protest by four women who stood before Number One as he tried to heh-heh his way through a post-election debriefing, holding up placards commemorating one of the lowest points in South's Africa's then adolescent democracy: the Zuma rape trial and acquittal, which openly endorsed and entrenched South Africa's particularly noxious brand of rape culture. Their strategy was brilliant -- four young women in elegant black dresses stepped to the front of the auditorium and stood between the president and his audience in silence, their backs to him, literally replacing his words with the ones written on their placards.

Millions must share my relief at knowing that Khwezi, the name given to the Zuma rape accuser, has not been forgotten, that young South Africans recognise the price she paid (nothing less than exile), that the unashamedly sexist, irresponsible and dangerous.behaviour modelled by a man then about to seize leadership of the country has not been swept under the carpet. For an excellent commentary on the significance of their actions, read the unfailingly reliable Sisonke Msimang. If this is the calibre of young activists today, then we can breathe a little easier.

And there have been other glimmers. Prof Pumla Dineo Gqola wrote an electrifyingly good book on rape in South Africa -- angry, articulate, breathless with momentum and bristling with signposts to alternative ways of living our lives without fear. And then she won the Alan Paton award -- South Africa's most prestigious prize for non-fiction -- for it. Michelle Hattingh wrote a memoir (I'm The Girl Who Was Raped) that made for bleak reading, but spelled out clearly and without shame, the multitude of ways the criminal justice system, the medical profession, and society in general, utterly fails rape survivors. Less solution-oriented than Gqola's book, it still makes it crystal clear that our current models for dealing with sexual violence are abject failures; that as long as we deplore rape while accepting and/or encouraging rape culture, nothing will change.

I marked this 60th year since our foremothers massed into one brave cohort and marched on the citadel of apartheid by digging out my research on sexual violence for the umpteenth time, and trying to put the bits I've published into a single manuscript. This time, it actually got off to a publisher. A book doesn't have the immediacy of a rant: but there is so much to say, so much to be undone, unpicked, re-imagined, I had to give it a bash.

So, this year, take the swearing and the fury as a given. And hopefully, next year there'll be a book with constructive analysis, as a tiny token of honour and respect for South African women, and the heavy lifting they do. And as always: donate to Rape Crisis, who do the hard stuff, the life-saving work.