Alice Mabota

Maria Alice Mabota (8 April 1949 – 12 October 2023) was a Mozambican human rights activist and president of the Mozambique Human Rights League.

Life Youth Maria Alice Mabota was born in 1949 in the Missão José mission, current Hospital Geral José Macamo, in Lourenço Marques. Typically, families with so-called "indigenous" status - as was the family of Mabota - did not register children immediately at birth. For this reason, her age was estimated in comparison of physiognomy with other children.

Mabota occasionally lived with her father in Machava 15. The first elementary school attended by Mabota at the Missão de São Roque Mission Station in Matutuíne, about 100 kilometers from the capital. However, as usual for Mozambicans with "indigenous" status, they were only able to complete elementary school there. At times, she also lived with her uncle on the opposite side of the capital, in Catembe. There Mabota was also baptized in 1966. Alice Mabota talking with Douglas Griffiths, US ambassador to Mozambique from 2012 to 2016. Since then Alice Mabota has chaired the Human Rights League and has established herself as one of Mozambique's civil society's most popular voices. Especially in the 2010s, she criticized the increasing polarization of Mozambican politics between FRELIMO and RENAMO. The Human Rights League, along with other organizations of Mozambican civil society, organized several protest marches for peace, equality and against corruption in the Mozambican capital. In the course of this, she received numerous death threats and also public insults, which are attributed to the radical FRELIMO wing. The Mozambican criminal police also interrogated her, as she was accused of presidential defamation.

In 2010, Mabota received the United States government-sponsored International Women of Courage Award.

In 2014, Mabota temporarily considered running for the presidential election, but eventually withdrew. She eventually decided to run for president in the 2019 elections.

Death Alice Mabota died in a hospital in South Africa on 12 October 2023, at the age of 74.