Lilian Ngoyi
![Photo: Azola Dayile [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c9edf9111f78419cff9bb06/1568859655766-F5MBJ9LEM7D5U4RSQJEM/lilian+button.png)
Photo: Azola Dayile [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
Country: South Africa
Location: Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa
About
Lilian Masediba Ngoyi (September 25, 1911-March 13, 1980) was a South African anti-apartheid activist, politician, and political prisoner. Ngoyi was elected as the president of the African National Congress (ANC) Women's League and was the second president of the Federation of South African Women.
Biography by Jaedyn Griddine
Lilian Ngoyi of the Eastern Cape gives an oration at the funeral of friend and comrade, Ida Mntwana. Date Unknown. Photo Credit: Azola Dayile. Wikimedia Commons.
Lilian Ngoyi was one of the mothers of anti-apartheid activism; she cherished her peers and constituents as if they were family, and fought for their rights until her time came to pass her legacy onto the next generations of activists–a legacy which lives on today in South Africa, Europe, and even places where her own feet never landed.
Ngoyi was born in 1911 in Pretoria; her large family included a father who worked in a platinum mine, a mother who laundered clothes, and five other children. Her family experienced poverty to the point where she had to leave the Kilnerton Institution, where she studied with hopes of becoming a teacher, and enter the workforce to provide for her family. She worked as a nurse at times and a domestic servant at others; during this period, between the mid-1920’s and ‘30’s, she married John Ngoyi and had three children: Edith Mosime, Memory Chauke, and Eggart.
Ultimately, Ngoyi followed after her mother and took up work in a clothing factory from 1945 to 1956. During her time there, she exercised her political mind by joining and eventually leading the Garment Workers Union. She then took her skills to the African National Congress (ANC), where she co-founded (and later became president of) the ANC Women’s League and took part in the 1950 Defiance Campaign, where she was subsequently arrested for using a segregated post office. In this particular incident, she was able to get her charges dropped after five court visits, but this would later become the first of her many, many encounters with the police and carceral system. Her adeptness in public speaking and leadership allowed her to branch out into other organizations; she became one of FEDSAW’s national vice presidents in 1954, then a World Mothers' Conference and Women's International Democratic Federation delegate the following year, then FEDSAW president in 1956, just to name a few. During this period between 1954 and ‘56, she also continuously stamped her passport in (mainly socialist) countries in Europe and Asia while speaking on various panels and at several protests.
This tour was no vacation, however, as she had to evade the South African government’s efforts to bar her from leaving the country; with the help of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, Ngoyi was able to solidify her image as a radical Black woman in the global political arena. When she returned to South Africa, she continued to make strides in anti-apartheid activism, becoming the ANC national executive committee’s first female member, president of FEDSAW, and co-leader of one of the largest protests in the country, a women’s anti-pass march; the hand which knocked on Prime Minister Strijdom’s door was none other than Ngoyi’s, with thousands of petitions in the other.
The harsh reality is, for all her accomplishments, Ngoyi faced state violence and incarceration up until her death. She was incarcerated up until 1953 for her anti-apartheid work; she was denied a visa to leave the country before her 1954-1956 tour, leading to her arrest while boarding transit to a Switzerland conference; she was one of 156 prolific leaders to be arrested for high treason in 1956; she was placed under South Africa’s cruel banning orders in 1962 until 1972, enduring ten years of constant police surveillance and the inability to interact with more than one person at a time or leave Orlando Township, Johannesburg. During this time, she faced unjust imprisonment-mostly in solitary confinement--for 5 months in the mid-1960s. Her banning orders were then renewed for a 5-year sentence in 1975; she died the same year her sentence ended. She is remembered as the mother of Black resistance and, tenderly, Ma Ngoyi, in South Africa.
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