Mildred Ramakaba-Lesiea
Mandu Mildred Ramakaba-Lesiea is a South African politician and veteran of the African National Congress, which she joined in 1954. After the end of apartheid in 1994, she represented the ANC in the National Assembly from 1998 to 2004.
Ramakaba-Lesiea joined the ANC in the early years of the struggle against apartheid in order to participate in the campaign against the Bantu Education Act of 1953. In subsequent decades, she was a prominent figure in women's activism and community organising in Cape Town; she was imprisoned under the Suppression of Communist Act in the 1960s and was detained for her activism on several other occasions. In 2005, the South African government awarded her the Order of Luthuli in Silver in recognition of her contribution to the struggle.
Early life
Ramakaba-Lesiea was born on 28 January 1933 in Langa outside Cape Town in the former Cape Province. Her father, Sello Ramakaba, was originally from Lesotho and grew up in the Orange Free State; her mother, Francina Pretorius, also grew up in the Free State but was racially mixed, with an Afrikaans mother and a Sotho father. During her childhood, the family moved to Kensington, where she attended high school until standard six. In 1949, her father died and her mother remarried an ex-soldier who encouraged her to marry due to the family's financial constraints. Instead, Ramakaba-Lesiea left home to work as a live-in domestic worker in Sea Point.Anti-apartheid activism
In 1952, Ramakaba-Lesiea moved with her newlywed husband to Elsie's River, where they stayed in an informal settlement called Maseru. Two years later, the apartheid government began implementing the Bantu Education Act; Ramakaba-Lesiea's opposition to the legislation drew her into anti-apartheid activism, first through the Elsie's River Civic Association and then through the African National Congress, both of which she joined in 1954. Over the next several years she participated in large-scale civil disobedience campaigns, including protests against pass laws and forced removals. She became a local leader in the ANC Women's League in Cape Town and was active in the Federation of South African Women; by 1958, she had also secretly joined the South African Communist Party, which was already banned by the apartheid government. In 1959 she also began organising for the Brick, Cement and Quarry Workers' Union, an affiliate of the South African Congress of Trade Unions.Ramakaba-Lesiea was detained for fourteen days in 1959 after a women's anti-dompas protest, and later in 1959 she was forcibly removed from Elsie's River to Nyanga in terms of the Group Areas Act. She was detained for a further five months in 1963, much of the time in solitary confinement, and then, shortly after her release, was rearrested. In 1964, she and 44 others were charged with sabotage under the Suppression of Communism Act; she was convicted and sentenced to six years' imprisonment, and she became the first woman to be held at Pollsmoor Prison before her sentence was overturned in an appeal in 1965. After her release, she was subject to house arrest, and in 1966 she was briefly forced to move to distant Witsieshoek during a dispute with the government about her compliance with pass laws.
She ultimately returned to domestic work and then to factory work. At the same time, she remained active in the women's movement and was increasingly involved in supporting the families of political detainees. She was a founding member and inaugural chairperson of Cape Town's United Women's Organisation in 1981. Throughout the 1980s she was active in the United Democratic Front and did underground work for the ANC. She was detained for another five months during the 1985 state of emergency.