Sonja Schlesin

Sonja Schlesinger ( born June 6 1888 in Moscow, Russian Empire; † 6 January 1956 in Johannesburg) was a South African civil rights activist and member Mohandas Gandhi.

Life

Schlesins Jewish parents emigrated to South Africa in 1902. At seventeen, she was hired through the agency of Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi as a legal secretary in the law firm start-ups in 1903 in Johannesburg. Gandhi represented the interests of the immigrant to South Africa Indian workers and small traders. He organized the resistance of the Indians against racial discrimination and the strike of the Indian gold miners and developed in this time with the Satyagraha new forms of resistance. During his repeated detentions in the campaigns in 1906, 1909 and 1913 organized Schlesin Gandhi's attorney office and out of there organizations. In 1908 she wrote the speech delivered by Gandhi against the registration of the Indians under the "Black Act".

After the "Black Act" was withdrawn in 1914, Gandhi went to Britain and their ways parted. Schlesinger graduated from the University College of Johannesburg trained as a teacher and received in 1926 a Master of Arts from the University of Witwatersrand. The next few years she worked as a Latin teacher in a high school in Krugersdorp.

In 1953, she began another study of law at the University of Natal, she no longer was able to complete.

Among the main roles in 1980, first performed opera Satyagraha by Philip Glass are Miss Schlesen [ sic], MK Gandhi, Mr. Kallenbach and Parsi Rustomji.