Sybil Hotz: Nurse turned apartheid-busting mayor
SYBIL Hotz, who has died in Durban at the age of 84, was a tough and effective mayor of the city for four years. In defiance of government policy and in the face of stiff resistance from conservative whites, she tackled petty apartheid head on, opening the beaches and libraries to all races.
There were abusive phone calls and two attempted bombings of her home in Bellair. During a particularly nasty period she had seven armed guards stationed there.
After she left the council in 1990, residents looked back on the Hotz era with nostalgia as a time when the city council got things done.
Hotz was born Tremearne, the second of five sisters, on December 19 1928 in Durban. Her family came to Natal from Cornwall in the 1870s.
She always wanted to be a nurse. At the age of 12 she joined the St John Ambulance and, on most Saturdays during World War 2, would don her uniform and help to nurse sick and wounded soldiers at King’s House. After matriculating at Durban Girls’ High School, she went to Grey’s Hospital in Pietermaritzburg and qualified as a nursing sister. She worked as a theatre sister at King
She was eccentric and unpretentious, and never happier than when telling a funny but unflattering story about herself
Edward VIII Hospital in Durban.
In 1956 she enrolled for the first diploma in nursing education course to be offered at the University of Natal. After graduating, she lectured in nursing at King Edward, St Augustine’s and Enta- beni hospitals, the ML Sultan Technical College and the department of nursing at the University of Natal.
She was famous for being able to give a class on any subject from surgery to sanitation with no more than an hour’s notice.
Her husband Alec, whom she met while a student nurse at Grey’s Hospital, was a general practitioner and often the only doctor serving the municipal ward in which they lived, which included the poor and neglected areas of Hillary and Bellair.
One day he took her around the area to show her the problems people had to contend with. He said that if she joined the council, she could perhaps get the problems attended to.
She went to the city hall, listened to a debate and, being an effective speaker thanks to her years as a lecturer, decided to try for council even if it meant giving up the certain prospect of a professorship at the University of Natal.
In 1974 she was elected and threw herself into council work while still lecturing at the university. She became chairwoman of the all-important health and housing committee in 1977, chairwoman of the management committee and deputy mayor in 1978.
In 1980 she became mayor, only the second woman to hold this post, and served a record four terms until 1984. Because her husband supported her work, she was able to do the mayoral job on a fulltime basis and be completely hands-on, unlike many other mayors who performed only ceremonial roles. She then served as management committee chairwoman for a number of years.
She remembered the city being “riddled with apartheid laws”. The beaches, libraries, parks, buses, benches and public toilets were all segregated. The first thing she did was to open the libraries to all races. “The rest followed,” she said in an interview with the Financial Mail last year. “Anything we could legally get rid of, we did. The big one was the beaches.”
Hotz played a leading role in making the people of Durban aware of the huge deprived population of KwaZulu on their doorstep. She was the first mayor to establish a working relationship with the KwaZulu government.
Her consistent representations to the national government led to the appointment of the Rive commission charged with investigating the quality of life of urban black people and making recommendations for their upliftment. She left the council in 1990. As much as she loved the mechanics and management of a large city, Hotz hated domestic chores and avoided them as much as she could. She would go into work — in the early days on the back of a friend’s motorbike — with her hem undone and fix it impatiently with sticky tape or a stapler. She was as eccentric as she was unpretentious, and never happier than when telling a funny but unflattering story about herself. She is survived by two sons.