Amina Cachalia

Amina Cachalia (28 June 1930 – 31 January 2013) was a South African anti-apartheid activist, women's rights campaigner and politician. ^{1 2} A longtime friend and ally of Nelson Mandela, she was a leader of the Federation of South African Women, spent fifteen years under house arrest, and was elected to the National Assembly in the first democratic election of 1994. ¹

She was born Amina Asvat in Vereeniging, Transvaal, on 28 June 1930, the ninth of eleven children of political activists Ebrahim Ismail Asvat and Fatima Asvat; her sister Zainab Asvat was also an activist. ^{1 2} She began campaigning against apartheid and racial discrimination as a teenager, joined the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress, and was a founding member of the Women's Progressive Union in 1948, which taught women literacy, dress-making, secretarial skills and baby care to help them become economically independent. ¹

In the early 1950s she joined the ANC and worked for the Defiance Campaign; she was arrested on the Germiston march of 26 August 1952 and sentenced to fourteen days in Boksburg Prison. ¹ When the Federation of South African Women was founded in Johannesburg on 17 April 1954, she sat on its steering committee with Helen Joseph and Lillian Ngoyi and served as its treasurer; she marched with the Federation to the Union Buildings in Pretoria while pregnant with her son Ghaleb. ¹

During the 1956 Treason Trial she helped her sister Zainab support the accused and their families, collecting food and money for them. ¹ She then spent fifteen years under house arrest through the 1960s and 1970s. ¹ Afterwards she campaigned against the government's separate-election plans through Anti-SAIC committees, was an active member of the United Democratic Front, and in the 1990s served on the PWV regional committee of the ANC Women's League. ¹

She was elected to the National Assembly in the 1994 election, the country's first with universal adult suffrage. ¹ She had married the activist Yusuf Cachalia, secretary of the Transvaal Indian Congress, in 1955; he died in 1995. ^{1 2} The English article records that in 1995 Nelson Mandela asked her to marry him, and that she declined, saying she was her own person and had only recently lost a husband she held in enormous regard. ¹

She died at Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg on 31 January 2013, aged 82, of complications from a perforated ulcer. Her funeral was held at her home according to traditional Muslim customs, attended by President Jacob Zuma, former presidents Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe, Cyril Ramaphosa, Graça Machel and Ahmed Kathrada, among others. ¹

Her autobiography, When Hope and History Rhyme, was published in March 2013, after her death. ¹ In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Luthuli in Bronze for her contributions to gender and racial equality and to democracy, and received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of the Witwatersrand the same year. ¹

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

Cachalia's women's rights work focused often on economic questions, such as financial independence for women, as the sources describe it. ^{1 2} She opposed the government's plan to let Indians elect separate representatives without extending the same right to black South Africans — the road to the Tricameral Parliament — and the sources describe her as a staunch anti-apartheid activist to the end of the system. ¹

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