Lillian Ngoyi
Lilian Masediba Ngoyi ( born September 25, 1911 in Pretoria, † 13 March 1980 in Soweto; occasionally Lillian Ngoyi; born Lilian Masediba Matabane ) was a South African politician and women's rights activist.
Life
Lilian Ngoyis mother was a laundress, her father a miner in the eastern Transvaal. Lilian Ngoyi in 1952 was a widow with two children and worked as a seamstress when she, the women's organization of the African National Congress joined the ANC Women's League. 1953 she was elected president of the Women's League. In 1954 she was one of the co-founders of the Federation of South African Women ( FEDSAW ), whose President was 1956.
In 1955 she traveled illegally to Lausanne in Switzerland to there at the " World Congress of Mothers" participate. She has toured countries such as the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, Romania, the Soviet Union and China and met mainly leftist feminists, before returning to South Africa. In 1956 she was elected as the first woman in the Executive Committee of the ANC.
On 9 August 1956, she was with Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu and Sophia Williams -de Bruyn to the leaders of a protest march of around 20,000 women in Pretoria, the objective of which was Union Buildings, the official seat of the South African government. Thus they demonstrated against the determination of the apartheid government that black men in accordance with the stringent pass laws had to constantly carry a proof of work and a new law women in the future as well. Ngoyi was to symbolically knocked on the door of the building to bring Prime Minister Strijdom 100,000 signatures. As of December of the same year, she was among the 156 accused in the Treason Trial, which lasted until 1961 and ended with the acquittal of all defendants.
In 1960, she was indeed against free on bail, but came because of their political activity after the ban of the ANC five months in solitary confinement. From 1962 until her death she was banned almost continuously so that they in Orlando in Soweto often could not leave their house and their political tasks could not pursue.
Lilian Ngoyi died in 1980 from heart problems. After the death of Helen Joseph 1992, the two women received a double grave at the Avalon Cemetery in Soweto.