Charlotte Maxeke

Charlotte Manye Maxeke was born in Fort Beaufort, in what is now the Eastern Cape of South Africa, on the seventh of April 1871. In 1894 she joined an African choir on tour to England and the United States; in Cleveland, Ohio, she was offered a scholarship to Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. She accepted. In 1901 she became the first Black South African woman to earn a Bachelor's degree, in literature, awarded by Wilberforce.

She returned to South Africa in 1902. She founded the Wilberforce Institute in Evaton — the first secondary school for Black girls in the Transvaal — and in 1918 founded the Bantu Women's League, the first organized political movement of Black African women on the African continent. The League led the 1913 Free State women's anti-pass demonstrations — the first mass political action by African women — which forced the suspension of pass-law extension to women for the next forty years.

She served as an organizer for the African National Congress through its early decades. Nelson Mandela wrote of her in his autobiography that she was "the mother of African freedom in South Africa." Albertina Sisulu and Lilian Ngoyi — who would lead the 1956 Women's March a generation later — both credited her example as the foundation of their work.

She died in Johannesburg on the sixteenth of October 1939, age sixty-eight. The Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital — one of the largest tertiary teaching hospitals in South Africa — bears her name.

She is honored here as the founding mother of the African women's political movement in Southern Africa.