Fatima Meer - Political Activist

Political Activist

In 1946, Meer joined many other South African Indians in a passive resistance campaign against apartheid, during which she started the Student Passive Resistance Committee. She also helped to establish the Durban District Women's League, an organisation started in order to build alliances between Africans and Indians as a result of the race riots between the two groups in 1949.

After the National Party gained power in 1948 and started implementing their policy of apartheid, Meer’s activism increased; she was one of the founding members of the Federation of South African Women, which spearheaded the historical women's march on the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956. As a result of her activism, Meer was first "banned" in 1952 ("banning" was a government practise that, amongst other things, limited the number of people a person could meet at any one time as well as a person's movements and also prohibited a person from being published).

In the 1960s, she organised night vigils to protest against the mass detention of anti-apartheid activists without trial. During the 1970s she was again banned and later detained without trial for trying to organise a political rally with Black Consciousness Movement figure Steve Biko. She narrowly survived an assassination attempt shortly after her release from detention in 1976 when she was shot at her family home in Durban, but luckily not harmed. Her son, Rashid, went into exile in the same year. She was attacked again and blamed the second attack on the Black Consciousness Movement.

She was a strong supporter of the Iranian Revolution and boycotted Salman Rushdie's trip to South Africa in 1998 claiming that he was a blasphemer.