TAINA BIEN-AIME | Meji rejected ‘sex work’ term in pursuit of equality

Nomonde Milhali “Mickey” Meji was born into the world as a poor black girl in Cape Town and left it on August 13 2026 as one of South Africa’s visionary human rights leaders, respected across the globe. She was 45 years old.

Lured into sex work when she was barely 18 years old and already the mother of a toddler, Meji survived against all odds, becoming one of the most extraordinary champions for victims and survivors of the sex trade worldwide.

With brilliant passion, she campaigned for South Africa and the myriad countries she toured to enact laws to end the criminalisation of prostituted individuals. Governments, she argued, must instead offer survivors trauma-informed services and end the impunity gifted to men who purchase them for sex acts.

Meji fought until her last breath to advance this legal framework, known as the Equality or Abolitionist Model. She and her African survivor sisters dubbed it the Sankara Equality Law, evoking the former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, who condemned sex work as a microcosm of exploitative societies. Sweden was the first country to enact the progressive law in 1999. Seven countries and one state in the US have since followed suit.

This law is also an effective tool to prevent sex trafficking, as it directly targets the demand for prostitution, the turbo engine that fuels the multi-billion dollar commercial sex industry.

Meji’s path to advocacy was distinctive. On the streets for nine years, the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Task Force (Sweat) recruited her as a peer educator responsible for distributing condoms and lubricants. It gave Meji a way out of sex work.

Recognising Meji’s formidable intellect, Sweat, an organisation founded by a white man, trained her to become a global advocate for the decriminalisation of the sex trade.

They then moved her to the African Sex Workers Alliance as a country co-ordinator, and Sisonke, both offshoots of Sweat.

They also introduced Meji to the term “sex work”, a slogan the Euro-American prostitution and pornography industries coined to normalise sexual exploitation. Meji said the word “sex worker” initially appealed to her because it sounded better than the demeaning “prostitute”, but soon rejected it, realising its goal was to legitimise prostitution.

Meji was a star Sweat operative, but on discovering that funders, such as Open Society Foundations, required a pledge to “decriminalise sex work” in exchange for grants and that their interests rested with brothel owners, she left in anger.

That decision, she said, wasn’t a choice between the feminist abolitionist movement or Sweat, but by her own transformation listening to survivors.

These women shared histories of childhood sexual abuse, misogyny, racism and abandonment by family and state. They belonged to a people fractured by colonialism and shaped by apartheid. Survivors needed care and dignity, not policies that would exponentially expand the deadly sex trade.

While Meji agreed the current South African law criminalising prostituted people needs urgent reform, she characterised every effort by her government to “decriminalise sex work” as a betrayal of black women, a class overwhelmingly represented in prostitution.

Meji often cited late president Nelson Mandela, who understood that male violence against women and girls reduces our humanity and prostitution condemns for a lifetime. Madiba inspired her to take action and at every turn she rejected the ideology that celebrates male sexual access in a country where femicide is raging.

She formed groundbreaking survivor networks in South Africa, first Kwanele, counting more than 700 members in seven provinces, and subsequently the Survivor Empowerment and Support Program.

Recently, Meji submitted testimony against Sweat’s arguments in its lawsuit against the ministry of justice before the Western Cape Division of the High Court that decriminalising the purchase of sex will create a safer South Africa. The case is scheduled to be heard in October.

In her short lifetime, Meji buried many of her sisters in the struggle, knowing prostitution would one day kill her too. She died of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer sometimes linked to HIV/Aids.

“If Mickey disappears tomorrow, someone must pick up the fight,” she would tell me. “South Africa cannot become a country where prostitution is what is left for black women when everything else is taken away. We deserve justice and equality, not the sex trade.”

• Bien-Aimé is a global women’s rights advocate and executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

Sowetan