This paper works to address arguments that the South African Constitution is an example of coloniality by connecting the Constitution’s equality clause with the struggles by black women. The paper summarizes advocacy, protests, and demonstrations by African women, particularly black women, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Groups of African women worked to receive better treatment from the government, at different points in time related to mobility, treatment at the hands of police, affordable housing and transportation, trade unionization, and rights for women at work. These struggles of African women form the “backbone” of 1954 and 1994 Women’s Charters written by women’s groups. At that time, the Women’s Charters uniquely included women as full members of the nation. The South African Constitution came to include a similar formulation of recognizing women as members of the state, and used other extended concepts of equality presented in the Charters. The author identifies the Women’s Charters as an invisible palimpsest of the South African Constitution because analysis often has the Constitution rooted firmly in the Freedom Charter.