Jenny Schreiner

Jennifer Ann Schreiner (born 1956) is a retired South African politician, activist, and civil servant who represented the African National Congress (ANC) in the National Assembly from 1994 to 1997. She has been a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party (SACP) since 1991 and formerly headed the party's secretariat.

Schreiner joined the ANC and its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, while a student in Cape Town. She rose to national prominence in September 1987 when she was arrested and charged with terrorism alongside Tony Yengeni and 12 others. She was released in 1991 following a protracted detention and later the same year was elected to the SACP Central Committee for the first time. She served in the first democratic Parliament from 1994 to 1997, chairing the Constitutional Assembly's subcommittee on security services, and later served in the senior civil service for two decades from 1997 until her retirement in 2017. Her civil service career included stints in the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee, as Chief Deputy Commissioner for Correctional Services, and as director-general for the Department of Economic Development and Department of Women. She was elected to her eighth consecutive term on the SACP Central Committee in 2022.

Early life and family Schreiner was born in 1956 in Johannesburg in the former Transvaal, the third of four children born to Else and Deneys Schreiner. Her father, later an academic at the University of Natal, was a member of the white liberal Schreiner family: her grandfather was Oliver Schreiner, a progressive appellate judge, and her great-grandfather was William Schreiner, a former prime minister of the Cape Colony and the brother of writer Olive Schreiner. Her mother was a founding member of the Liberal Party and of the Black Sash, and in the 1980s was president of the National Council of Women. Schreiner's younger sister, Barbara, also became a civil servant in the post-apartheid government and was an adviser to Minister Kader Asmal.

Schreiner grew up in Pietermaritzburg in Natal Province, where she attended the Epworth School. She began university at the University of Natal in 1974, studying the sciences, and in 1977 moved to the University of Cape Town (UCT) to study social science. and she later completed a master's in security studies at the University of Pretoria.

Anti-apartheid activism While at university in Natal, Schreiner was active in the National Union of South African Students and its Wages Commission, as well as in the student representative council. In Cape Town in 1979, she was recruited into the underground of the African National Congress (ANC), then banned inside South Africa, and went on to join the South African Communist Party (SACP) and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC's armed wing. and Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok told the press that they had uncovered the entire command structure of "an ANC terrorist network", calling it "the biggest-ever breakthrough against suburban terrorism in South Africa"; he also said that Schreiner was suspected of having planted a bomb in the Cape Town International Airport in July 1986. she and the others were moved to Cape Town's Pollsmoor Prison in February 1988. The defendants exploited the prosecution for political purposes. When the trial began in early 1989,

SACP Central Committee: 1991 In December 1991, Schreiner was elected for the first time to the Central Committee of the SACP; she has remained a member since then. She served the ANC's constituency office in Saldanha on the Cape West Coast. While in Parliament, she chaired the committee of the Constitutional Assembly which dealt with negotiating provisions for the post-apartheid security services in the 1996 Constitution; she was also a member of the Joint Standing Committees on Defence and Intelligence. She resigned from her seat in 1997 to join the civil service. In 2012, President Jacob Zuma appointed her to a five-year term as a director-general, initially in the Department of Economic Development and then, from April 2015, in the Presidency's Department of Women. At the congress, she was re-elected to another five years on the SACP Central Committee – her eighth consecutive term on the committee. and she was also appointed to a three-year term on the board of Broadband Infraco. and in 2022, she and Nathi Mthethwa were appointed to assist Thandi Modise as a three-man task team evaluating the status of the ANC Women's League's leadership under Bathabile Dlamini. In February 2023, she was appointed to a five-year term as a member of the ANC's internal Integrity Commission, chaired by Frank Chikane and Sophie Williams-de Bruyn. In 2001, with Marion Sparg and Gwen Ansell, she co-edited Comrade Jack, a collection of writings by, and biographical sketches of, SACP stalwart Jack Simons.