Fatima Meer

Fatima Meer (12 August 1928 - ) is a South African writer and academic, a screenwriter, and was a prominent anti-apartheid activist.

Early life

She was born in Durban, the largest city in what is now KwaZulu-Natal Province, into a family of nine, where her father, a newspaper editor, instilled in her a consciousness of the racial discrimination that existed in the country. She completed her schooling at the Durban Indian Girls High School and subsequently attended the University of Natal, where she completed a Masters degree in Sociology.

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 Districts 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 at her family home in Durban, but luckily not harmed. Her son, Rashid, went into exile in the same year.

Academic and writer

Meer was on the staff of the University of Natal from 1956 to 1988 and was also a visiting professor at a number of universities in South Africa, the U.S., India, Mauritius, the Caribbean and Britain. She is also a fellow of the London School of Economics. She has also received two honorary doctorates for her work for human and women's rights.

She has been an editor of at least eighteen publications and has also written more than forty books on a wide variety of subjects.

Books

*"Portrait of Indian South Africans"
*"Apprenticeship of a Mahatma"
*"Race and Suicide in South Africa"
*"Documents of Indentured Labour",
*"The South African Gandhi: The Speeches and Writings of M.K. Gandhi"
*"Resistance in the Townships"
*"Apartheid our Picture"
*"Passive Resistance".
*She also authored "Higher than Hope", the first authorized biography of Nelson Mandela, which was translated into 13 languages.

Film and television

* She wrote the screenplay for "The Making of the Mahatma", a Shyam Benegal film which was based on her book "The Apprenticeship of a Mahatma"; the film was co-produced by India and South Africa.
*She also wrote a docu-drama for television.

Awards

Some of the many awards given to Meer throughout her life include: the Union of South African Journalists Award (1975), the Imam Abdullah Haroon Award for the Struggle against Oppression and Racial Discrimination (1990) and the Vishwa Gurjari Award for Contribution to Human Rights (1994). She was on the Top 100 Women Who Shook South Africa list in 1999 and was also voted 45th in the Top 100 Great South Africans in 2004.