Emma Mashinini

Emma Mashinini (21 August 1929 – 10 July 2017 Most of the people in Prospect Township were relocated to Orlando, Soweto, but Mashinini's family was able to resettle in Sophiatown. Sophiatown was forcibly evicted in turn, several years later, and Mashinini's family moved to Soweto.

Mashinini left school at age 14 to work a job after the separation of her parents left her mother without enough money. (Her daughter Penny died at the age of 17 in 1971.)

Union organiser In 1956, Mashinini began working in the Henochsberg clothing factory, which was segregated by race as well as gender. In addition to the difficult conditions and bad pay offered to factory workers, Black women faced a unique and many-layered set of challenges. Treated as inferior to other workers, Black women faced police brutality and the violence of poverty under Apartheid when they returned home each day. Black workers also faced difficulties in getting to work on time—from the segregated neighbourhoods to which they had been confined.

Through different labour actions, the factory workers gained a 40-hour workweek and unemployment insurance. She was elected to the executive committee of the National Union of Clothing Workers (NUCW), on which she served for twelve years.

A turning point for Mashinini came when she thought about how clothing produced in her factory was being used. "When I realized that I had personally helped to make these uniforms used for the slaughter of my people ... I felt horrified", she wrote in her autobiography. She resolved that union organising would always touch on larger political issues.

In 1975, Mashinini founded the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU), becoming a powerful figure in the South African labour movement at large. Her activism led to constant police harassment.

Mashinini was brought to Pretoria Central Prison. She spent much time in solitary confinement and was denied access to basic necessities. She was eventually transferred to a prison in Johannesburg and released after a total of six months—never charged with a crime. She described this treatment as "yet another detention." She returned to a leadership position in the SACCAWU, which expanded to 60,000 members and won increased rights for female workers.

In 1995, Mashinini was appointed as a Commissioner for Restitution of Land Rights, returning to Pretoria as a part of the government. In 1998, she helped to secure land rights for a community of 600 families that had been evicted in 1969. During her tenure, she said that her agency suffered from a lack of personnel and funding. In 2002, she commented that she was "greatly distressed" by a court ruling limiting compensation for the many South Africans claiming land rights. "I saw the task for myself and for ourselves as getting the land back to the people," she said.

Death Mashinini died in Johannesburg on 10 July 2017 at the age of 87.

Works Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life, autobiography