Fatima Meer

Fatima Meer (12 August 1928 – 12 March 2010) was a South African writer, academic, screenwriter and prominent anti-apartheid activist, born and died in Durban. ^{1 2} She is best known for Higher than Hope (1990), the first authorised biography of Nelson Mandela, translated into many languages. ^{1 2}

Meer was born in the Grey Street area of Durban into a family of nine. Her father, M. I. Meer, edited the newspaper The Indian View; her mother, Rachel Farrell, converted to Islam and took the name Amina. ¹ At sixteen, in 1944, she helped raise £1,000 for famine relief in Bengal. ¹

She was educated at the Durban Indian Girls' High School, where she mobilised students to found the Student Passive Resistance Committee in support of the Indian community's passive resistance campaign of 1946–1948. ¹ After a year at the University of the Witwatersrand she went to the University of Natal, where she completed a bachelor's and a master's degree in sociology. ^{1 2}

In 1950 she and Kesaveloo Goonam became the first women elected to the executive of the Natal Indian Congress. ¹ She helped establish the Durban and District Women's League on 4 October 1952, to build alliances between Africans and Indians after the 1949 race riots. ¹ She was a founding member of the Federation of South African Women, established on 17 April 1954, and one of the leaders of the women's march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria on 9 August 1956. ¹

The apartheid government first banned her in 1952, for three years, and again in 1976, for five years. She was detained in 1976 after the Soweto uprising, and shortly after her release survived an assassination attempt at her family home in Durban. ^{1 2}

She was a lecturer in sociology at the University of Natal from 1956 to 1988 — the first non-white person to hold that position — and in 1972 founded the Institute for Black Research, a research, publishing and educational institution. ¹ She declined the offer of a seat in parliament in 1994, preferring non-governmental work. ¹ She died at St Augustine's Hospital in Durban on 12 March 2010, of a stroke she had suffered two weeks earlier. ^{1 2}

Her books include Portrait of Indian South Africans (1969), The Apprenticeship of a Mahatma (1970), Race and Suicide in South Africa (1976), Towards Understanding Iran Today (1985) and Higher than Hope (1990). ¹ She wrote the screenplay for Shyam Benegal's film The Making of the Mahatma, based on her book The Apprenticeship of a Mahatma. ¹

She received three honorary doctorates — from Swarthmore College (1984), Bennett College (1994) and the University of Natal (1998) — and was awarded the Order of Luthuli in Silver in 2017, after her death. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

In the 1970s Meer embraced Black Consciousness ideology, working with the South African Students' Organisation led by Steve Biko. ¹ The English article reports that she was a strong supporter of the Iranian Revolution, that she boycotted Salman Rushdie's 1998 trip to South Africa calling him a blasphemer, that she took part in protests against the oppression of the Palestinian people and against the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, and that she founded Jubilee 2000 to campaign for cancellation of Third World debt. ¹

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