Lilian Ngoyi

Lilian Ngoyi Masediba (* 25. September 1911 in Pretoria , † 13. March 1980 in Soweto ; occasionally Lillian Ngoyi ; born Lilian Masediba Matabane ) was a South African politician and women's rights activist .

Life

Lilian Ngoyi's mother was a laundress, her father a miner in the eastern Transvaal . Lilian Ngoyi was a widow with two children and worked as a seamstress in 1952 when she joined the ANC Women's League , the women's organization of the African National Congress . In 1953 she was elected President of the Women's League. In 1954 she was one of the co-founders of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), of which she became president in 1956.

In 1955 she traveled illegally to Lausanne , Switzerland, to take part in the “World Congress of Mothers”. She traveled to countries such as the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, Romania, the Soviet Union and China and met, above all, left-wing women's rights activists before returning to South Africa. In 1956, she was the first woman to be elected to the Executive Committee of the ANC.

On August 9, 1956, along with Helen Joseph , Albertina Sisulu and Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, she was one of the leaders of a protest march by around 20,000 women in Pretoria , whose goal was the Union Buildings , the official seat of the South African government. In doing so, they demonstrated against the determination of the apartheid government that black men had to carry proof of work at all times according to the stricter passport laws , and that women would in future also have to carry a new law. It was Ngoyi who symbolically knocked on the door of the building to deliver around 100,000 signatures to Prime Minister Strijdom . From December of the same year she was one of 156 defendants in the Treason Trial , which lasted until 1961 and ended with the acquittal of all defendants.

In 1960 she was released on bail, but because of her political activities she was placed in solitary confinement for five months after the ANC was banned . From 1962 she was banned almost continuously until her death , so that she was often not allowed to leave her home in Orlando in Soweto and could not pursue her political duties.

Ngoyi's grave in Soweto (with Helen Joseph)

Lilian Ngoyi died in 1980 of heart problems. After the death of Helen Joseph in 1992, the two women were given a double grave in Avalon Cemetery in Soweto.

Honors

• In 1982 Ngoyi was posthumously awarded the Isitwalandwe , the ANC's highest award.
• August 9, the day of the Pretoria March, has been a South African holiday since August 9, 1994 as National Women's Day .
• On August 9, 2006, the 50th anniversary of the march, Strijdom Square, from which the march began, was renamed Lilian Ngoyi Square .
• A district of Mdantsane in the metropolitan municipality of Buffalo City is called Lilian Ngoyi Village.
• A health center in Soweto was named after Lilian Ngoyi.

literature

• Dianne Stewart: Lilian Ngoya. Maskew Miller Longman, Cape Town 1996, ISBN 0636022560
• Chris van Wyk: Lilian Ngoya. Awareness Pub., Johannesburg 2006, ISBN 9781770081550

Web links

• Portrait at sahistory.org.za (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography , accessed on February 4, 2016
2. ↑ Jürgen Schadeberg , Klaus Humann (Ed.): Drum. Rogner & Bernhard bei Zweiausendeins, Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-8077-0248-2 , p. 157.
3. ↑ Report at africanhistory.com ( Memento of the original from October 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English), accessed November 22, 2011 
4. ^ Description of the cemetery ( Memento from April 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (English), accessed on August 9, 2013
5. ↑ Description at za.geoview.info (English), accessed on October 18, 2014