Londiwe Buthelezi
12 August 2026
Nomvula Zulu stood in front of the mirror in her Durban flat, adjusting the collar of a blouse her mother had picked out for the family gathering. Thirty-four, unmarried, and childless – three facts that, in her aunt’s eyes, added up to a kind of quiet failure. She was a structural engineer, one of only two women in her firm, and she had spent the morning finalising drawings for a bridge that would carry thousands of commuters across the Umgeni River. None of that would come up at lunch. What would come up, gently but insistently, was when she planned to “settle down.”
“Ungowesifazane,” her aunt liked to say. You are a woman. As if the sentence needed no further explanation, as if it were a complete argument in itself.
Nomvula loved her family, and she understood the world they had come from – one where a woman’s worth was measured in the home she kept and the children she raised. But she had grown up between two worlds: her grandmother’s homestead in rural KwaZulu-Natal and the lecture halls of a Johannesburg university, where she’d been taught that her mind was an asset, not a threat. The gap between those worlds sat in her chest most days like a held breath.
At work, the pressure wore a different face. She was praised for being “articulate” in meetings where her male colleagues were simply heard. She was asked, more than once, whether she planned to have children soon – a question no one asked the men on her team, whose careers were never assumed to end at a nursery door. She had learned to laugh these moments off, but the laughter cost her something each time.
It was a conversation with a therapist, arranged through her firm’s employee wellness programme, that finally gave her language for what she’d been carrying.
“Many of the women I see are managing what I’d call a double consciousness,” says Thandeka Mthembu, a clinical psychologist based in Durban who works extensively with women navigating career and family pressures. “They are constantly translating themselves – softening ambition for family gatherings, hardening it again for the boardroom. That translation work is exhausting, and it rarely gets named as labour, even though it is.”
Mthembu notes that in South Africa specifically, these pressures are layered onto a history that complicates them further. “We’re dealing with the legacy of apartheid-era gender roles, deeply rooted cultural expectations around lobola and marriage, and a modern economy that increasingly needs women in the workforce. Those three things don’t always agree with each other, and women are left holding the contradiction.”
Sipho Ndlovu, a counselling psychologist who runs support groups for young professionals in Johannesburg, sees the toll this takes on mental health. “Chronic role strain – trying to be everything to everyone – is strongly linked to anxiety and burnout. I’ve had clients describe feeling like they’re failing at two full-time jobs: their actual career, and the unpaid job of meeting everyone else’s expectations of who they should be.”
For Nomvula, healing didn’t mean rejecting her culture or her family. It meant slowly renegotiating the terms – telling her aunt, kindly but firmly, that her bridge was also a kind of legacy. It meant setting boundaries at work when questions crossed a line. It meant, some days, simply naming the exhaustion out loud instead of swallowing it.
“There is no single fix,” Mthembu says. “But there is real value in women having spaces – therapeutic, communal, even just a conversation with a friend – where they can put the mask down. That’s often the first step toward carrying the weight differently, or putting some of it down for good.”
Nomvula finished adjusting her collar, looked at herself one more time, and decided the blouse could stay – but the apology in her posture could not.
If you’re personally struggling with pressures related to identity, family, or mental health, the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) offers free, confidential support 7 days a week. You can call their Suicide Crisis Line on 0800 567 567.
