Dora Tamana

Dora Ntloko Tamana (11 November 1901 – 23 July 1983) was a South African anti-apartheid activist.

Early life

Dora Ntloko was born at Gqamakwe, in Hlobo, Transkei, near Dutywa. Her grandfather was a Methodist preacher, but as a teen Dora converted, with her family, to the Israelite denomination.[1] She was 20 when her father died in the 1921 Bulhoek massacre of Israelite sect members.[2][3]

Career

After her father's death, Dora Ntloko moved to Queenstown, and after marriage and motherhood to Cape Town. During World War II, she lived in the Blouvlei settlement, where she became politically active with the Cape Flats Distress Association, resisting efforts to relocate the squatting residents. She joined the Communist Party in South Africa during this time, and soon the African National Congress Women's League.[2][4]

Dora Tamana's particular interest was in self-help programs: a food committee, a women's sewing cooperative, a childcare program.[5] She took a leadership role in the anti-pass movement in 1953,[4] and in 1954 became National Secretary of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW).[6] But in 1955, after attending the World Congress of Mothers in Switzerland with Lillian Ngoyi, she was banned by the South African government from attending political meetings.[7]

Harassed by police and rezoned out of Blouvlei, she moved to Gugulethu.[8] In her sixties, she served two jail sentences for her activism, and her son Bothwell was imprisoned and sentenced to death (he was later released, after Zimbabwe's independence).[9] But she stayed active with women's protests into the 1970s, and spoke at the launching meeting of the United Women's Organisation in 1981. Her poem exhorted the next generations of South African women to unite and act together for change:

You who have no words, speak.
You who have no homes, speak.
You who have no schools, speak.
You who have to run like chickens from the vulture, speak.
Let us share our problems so that we can solve them together.
We must free ourselves.[10]

Personal life

Dora Ntloko married another Bulhoek survivor, John Tamana. She had eight children; three of her children died in infancy. John Tamana left the family in 1948. Dora Tamana died in 1983, aged 82 years.[2] A park in Cape Town was named for Dora Tamana, dedicated in 2015 by government official Nomaindia Mfeketo.[11]

References

  1. ↑ "Portraits of Dora Tamana and Mildred Ramakaba Lesiea" in Helen Scanlon, Representation and Reality: Portraits of Women's Lives in the Western Cape, 1948-1976 (HSRC Press 2007): 167-199. ISBN 9780796921819
  2. 1 2 3 "Dora Tamana" South African History Online (2012).
  3. ↑ Robert Edgar, Because they Chose the Plan of God: The Story of the Bulhoek Massacre of 24 May 1921 (UNISA Press 2010). ISBN 9781868885442
  4. 1 2 Romaana Naidoo, "Remembering the voices of the women of 1956" Media Club South Africa (19 August 2014).
  5. ↑ Cherryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (New Africa Books 1991): 97-98. ISBN 9780864861702
  6. ↑ "Dora Tamana" South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid, Building Democracy (Michigan State University).
  7. ↑ Nicholas Grant, "Women's History Month: Lillian Masediba Ngoyi (1911-1980)" Women's History Network Blog (17 October 2010).
  8. ↑ Phiri Cawe, "ANC Veterans Honour Anti-Apartheid Icon" IOL (28 July 2016).
  9. ↑ "Dora Tamana" South African Communist Party website.
  10. ↑ Mary K. DeShazer, A Poetics of Resistance: Women Writing in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States (University of Michigan Press 1994): 40. ISBN 9780472065639
  11. ↑ Media advisory, Department of International Relations and Cooperation, "Deputy Minister Mfeketo to host the Dora Tamana Imbizo in Rondevlei, Cape Town" (7 October 2015).

External links

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