Hamba kahle Mama Fatima

On 12 March 2010, the world lost one of the greatest icons of struggle against apartheid, a champion of human rights, an advocate of the poor and disenfranchised, an outstanding academic and author and a woman of impeccable integrity and principles. Fatima Meer, also affectionately known as Aunty Bhen to close family and friends, passed away in hospital after suffering a major second stroke.

Penning a tribute to this remarkable individual is no easy feat given the legendary status she holds as one of the most powerful political figures of the 20th century. Having known her very closely – as an academic mentor, political comrade and a mother figure – I feel her loss very deeply. Since her demise a week ago, much has been written about her personal life, academic career and political activism. Apart from her public persona, she was also a wife, a mother, and a grandmother who loved her family dearly. But perhaps her most prolific role was that of being a humanitarian of great distinction, in the mould of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and her contemporary Nelson Mandela. At the very core of her being beat the heart of someone who could not bear to see injustice in any form. Her life long fight against injustice – be it apartheid, economic inequality, state repression, religious intolerance or gender inequality – was a testament to the principles she held most dear.

After 1994 – when many of her African National Congress (ANC) comrades opted for a comfortable and often lavish lifestyle, content simply with acquiring personal fame and wealth – she continued to stand firmly on the side of the historically disadvantaged, criticising the ANC-led South African government for its neoliberal economic policies which further marginalised the poor, who had already suffered greatly under apartheid. She was a fierce critic of the state, challenging even her closest friends and struggle comrades when she disagreed with them. In this regard she stood head and shoulders above others and, with perhaps the exception of a few of her comrades such as Dennis Brutus (who also passed away recently), was a towering example of someone who was not co-opted by a regime that has effectively betrayed the very fundamental tenets of the Freedom Charter and the ANC rallying call of a ‘better life for all’.

EARLY LIFE AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM

Fatima Meer was born in Durban in the late 1920s. She was greatly influenced by her father, Moosa Meer, who was the editor of a Durban-based newspaper, Indian Views, and was a strong political voice in his own right. She often reflected great regard for him in her personal musings on my various visits to her house, after she became largely wheelchair bound due to her first stroke. Her husband, Ismail Meer, was another strong political influence in her life. Being a close friend and political comrade of Nelson Mandela, it was inevitable that the Meer and Mandela families became inextricably linked both on a personal and political level: Fatima, Ismail, Nelson and his second wife Winnie Madikizela (and even their children) all experienced arrests and bannings at various intervals. Fatima and Winnie became close, lifelong friends, sharing the trials and tribulations of being wives, mothers and comrades in the anti-apartheid struggle.

Meer entered politics in the 1940s, becoming involved in the Passive Resistance campaign as a young student. After the race riots of 1949, she worked passionately to unite Africans and Indians across the city and country. In 1956, she was one of the leaders of the women’s march to the Union Buildings to protest against the pass laws for women of colour. When her husband was arrested some years later, under a state of emergency, she organised vigils outside the Durban prison where he was held, mobilising the families of all the prisoners who were being held without trial and arranging for food and other forms of support for them.

She also worked closely with Steve Biko in the 1970s and began to embrace the ideas of black consciousness, which became very central to much of her later writing. She was banned and arrested several times for her political activism in the 1970s. Perhaps her most well known political detention was in 1976, with other women activists including Winnie Mandela.

Apart from being recognised for her political activism against racial segregation, Meer was a renowned sociologist and an academic of note. She has the distinction of being the first ‘non-white’ woman to be appointed as an academic at a historically white university in apartheid South Africa. While at Natal University she founded the Institute for Black Research (IBR), which engaged in conducting progressive research that supported historically disadvantaged communities. As an academic and researcher she produced more than 40 books. Her autobiography of Nelson Mandela, ‘Higher than Hope’, is recognised internationally as his first authorised autobiography.

POST-APARTHEID CAMPAIGNS

She remained an engaged academic and public intellectual even after retiring from the University of Natal in the late 1980s. In fact it could be argued that her most powerful political work began in the 1990s, as she began the process of canvassing on behalf of the ANC amongst the Indian community. It was on one such campaign to the Chatsworth community in Durban in 1999 – as part of the Concerned Citizens Group – that she began to realise the full extent of the suffering of the disadvantaged masses even after the end of apartheid.

As Chatsworth residents, particularly the Bayview community, recounted to her their experiences of electricity and water cut offs and evictions by the local municipality officials, she began to take on the post-apartheid regime for their anti-poor policies as vociferously as she had tackled the apartheid state. Chatsworth had been created under apartheid and the group areas act, as an ‘Indian’ township. She assisted the poor and low income residents of the Chatsworth community, now made up of both Indian and African families, in organising themselves as a political formation. In the space of a few years, a mass grassroots movement had emerged in Chatsworth. Organisations like the Bayview Flats Residents Association, formed as a result of Meer’s intervention, was an ideal example of how a group of people, initially helpless against the brutality of the state regime, could eventually become a powerful, political space and refuse to be bullied into submission.

While Meer continued her association with Chatsworth and other communities that were struggling to respond to the state’s neo-liberal impositions, she also became critically involved in a range of global causes and campaigns. In 2001, during the World Conference Against Racism in Durban she famously led a march together with Dennis Brutus of around 20,000 people, who were calling for, amongst other things, the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation and reparations for the victims of racial injustice.

Meer was passionate about the Palestinian issue and attended and spoke at several rallies, marches and events held in solidarity with Palestine. When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and led a war in Iraq in 2003, she devoted herself to condemning American foreign policy, not only in the Middle East but globally, for its imperialist intentions and objectives. In all her analysis of local and global struggles, she always reminded us of the interconnectedness of these campaigns and how it was critical to fight oppression on both fronts. In the last few years of her life, Meer also became involved in debates around matters of faith and religion and continued to stress the significance of there being one God who united all of humankind. While her Islamic faith had been an inspiration to her throughout her life, she began to focus on how faith could bring people together regardless of their differences.

Fatima Meer’s story is a story perhaps unlike any other. Being a central figure in the fight against apartheid and certainly a legendary one in the post-apartheid period, she leaves a political and intellectual legacy that is profound and perhaps even incomparable. As someone who looked to her for guidance in my own activism and intellectual work, I am left bereft at her passing. But I am also reassured that her life was one which will continue to inspire those who come after her. While there can only be one Fatima Meer, she ignited the imagination of so many others that she came into contact with to fight for a better world. That is perhaps her most enduring contribution.

Hamba kahle Mama Fatima.

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* Lubna Nadvi teaches political science at the University of KwaZulu Natal and is a community activist.
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