Tributes pour in for Charter scribe Lipman
STRUGGLE veteran Beata Lipman — who hand-wrote the original Freedom Charter 61 years ago — was cremated in Johannesburg yesterday afternoon.
Lipman, who was born in 1928 and fled Nazi Germany as a child with her parents, died on Thursday after having spent seven weeks in the intensive care unit of Milpark Hospital.
Her daughter, Jane, said her 88-year-old mother had been frail.
Lipman became active in the struggle for freedom in South African in the early ’40s.
She married architect Alan Lipman and in 1955 wrote the Freedom Charter.
Jane said: ‘‘Back then, the men made all the decisions and the women just made the coffee . . . my mother resented that.”
Lipman worked alongside journalist Ruth First and was among the 20 000 women who marched on the Union Buildings on August 9 1956, where they handed over petitions signed by more than 100 000 people calling for an end to the pass laws.
The Lipmans were members of the SACP.
Jane, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, said that following the 1960 Sharpeville massacre her parents faced an increasing threat of arrest by security forces.
Concerned about the wellbeing and safety of their two children, they left South Africa for the UK in 1963, where Lipman became a print and TV journalist and worked for the BBC’s current affairs programme Newsnight.
We Make Freedom, her book on the lives of South African women activists, was published in 1984.
Jane said that when Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Walter Sisulu phoned her father and asked them to return to South Africa. Alan Lipman died in 2013. “My mom had a good few years after my father’s death and she managed to go to Mandela’s funeral in Qunu. That was lovely,” she said.
Tributes poured in for Lipman yesterday, with the ANC, ANC Women’s League and the Presidency sending condolences to the family.
“It is always saddening to lose such a principled and esteemed freedom fighter and struggle veteran like Ms Lipman, who was at the forefront during the 1955 Congress of the People which drafted the Freedom Charter, the foundation for our democratic constitution. We wish to convey our heartfelt condolences to her family and relatives,” President Jacob Zuma said in a statement.
Women’s league president Bathabile Dlamini said: “An astounding political activist, a feminist and a journalist who used her skills for the emancipation of women, she played a significant role in the struggle for freedom . . . and in South Africa’s film and TV industry, narrating the country’s history and addressing social ills with the documentaries she produced.”
Lipman is survived by Jane, her son, Peter, and three grandchildren.
Jane said the family would hold a memorial next month.
An astounding activist, a feminist and a journalist who used her skills to emancipate women