Fatima Meer
Professor Fatima Meer, a tireless human rights activist and noted academic, was instrumental i n creating links between Indian and African struggles against apartheid.
Meer was born in 1929 in Durban, and raised as one of nine children. Her father Moosa Ismail Meer was the owner and editor of the influential Indian Views newspaper. An inquiring academic mind, she studied at the University of Natal and Wits University, completing her masters in sociology.
Meer started the Student Passive Resistance Committee, joining the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign and addressing mass meetings of South African Indians. In response to the violent Durban race riots in 1949, she was part of establishing the Durban and District Women’s League, working together with the ANC Women’s League to build alliances between the black and Indian communities.
She married in 1950, and her husband Ismail “IC” Meer was also her partner in political activism. Together, they worked to build relationships and networks between the segregated races of South Africa in the fifties, most notably between the Indian and African National Congress.
Meer participated in the Natal activities of the 1952 Defiance Campaign, and was arrested and banned by the apartheid government from 1952 to 1954. However, she continued to speak out against race dis- crimination, eventually becoming one of the most recognised voices of the Black Consciousness Movement.
Due to her prominence and organising success, she was one of the first women leaders approached in Natal when the idea of Fedsaw was birthed. Her spearheading of the Women’s March was critical in ensuring women from Natal formed part of the protest on August 9 1956.
Meer returned to lecture sociology at the University of Natal in 1959, becoming the highest-level black academic at a white university in South Africa, and was a visiting professor at numerous international universities.
She travelled abroad several times, but the apartheid government refused to renew her passport after the June 1976 Soweto Uprising. She was then further banned for another five years, restricting her movement, association, writing or publishing. Fortunately, she could continue to teach.
Fedsaw was effectively silenced by the apartheid regime when it was forced underground, and many of its members were banned or imprisoned in the 1960s. Meer, together with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, attempted to revive Fedsaw in the 1970s. She was elected the first president of the South African Black Women’s Federation in 1975.
In the 1980s and into the 1990s, she worked with NGOs fighting for the rights of shack dwellers and urban migrants. She was also involved in building schools, a teaching college and a crafts centre, as the leader of the Natal Education Trust. When Meer was arrested for breaching her banning order, these projects were summarily shut down by the apartheid government.
Meer continued to work with nongovernmental organisations after the end of apartheid, as well as advising the government. She worked in activism to cancel third-world debt, as a member of Jubilee 2000. Nelson Mandela entrusted to Meer the task of his first authorised biography, Higher than Hope, in 1990.
A prolific writer as well as an academic, she authored several books, numerous articles and a film screenplay. She passed away in Durban in 2010, at the age of 81. — Romi Reinecke
Albertina Sisulu
orn in the Transkei in 1918, Albertina Thithewe was the eldest of eight girls. She trained as a nurse, later moving to Johannesburg. She married activist Walter Sisulu in 1944 and joined the ANC Women’s League in 1948.
In later years, she said: “I joined ANC in 1948 because of Lilian Ngoyi … The way she used to preach to me about the future of the child you are going to bring into this world.”
She rose to a leadership position both in the ANC and Fedsaw in the 1950s, as well as qualifying as a midwife during this time. She opposed Bantu education and used her home in Orlando West as a classroom.
Albertina was one of the organisers of the Women’s March, helping women bypass police blocks that were barring them from travelling to Pretoria. She said later: “The 9th of August was an eye-opener, in the sense that we thought that men could really be the people to carry reference books. But when it turned to us, we felt it’s something else now.
“We all stood and sang Nkosi Sikelele. You can imagine 20 000 voices in that amphitheatre, ungathi iya shukuma [it was like the amphitheatre was shaking].”
Arrested under the General Laws Amendment Act in 1963, she was kept in solitary confinement for nearly two months. Sisulu was again put in solitary confinement in 1981 and in 1985, as well as being served with banning orders and put under house arrest. When the ANC was unbanned in 1990, she helped to re-establish the ANC Women’s League. After 1994, she became a member of Parliament. She died in 2011. — Tracy Burrows