Joyce Sikakane

Joyce Nomafa Sikakane, later Sikakane-Rankin (born 1943), is a South African journalist and activist. She was detained by the Apartheid South African government for 17 months for her anti-apartheid activism.

Biography

Early life and education Sikakane was born in 1943 to Jonathan Sikakane and Amelia Nxumalo at the Bridgeman Memorial Maternity Hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. She grew up in Soweto, the daughter of a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her parents eventually separated and she started to attend the boarding-school Inanda Seminary.

Career and activism Sikakane began her career as a journalism in 1960 at The World, a white-run newspaper that catered to a black audience.

Marriage Around the same time as she started working at the Rand Daily Mail, Ken Rankin (1939–2011), but as such interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa, they made plans to marry outside the country. In 1973, Sikakane left South Africa for Zambia and the exiled branch of the ANC,

In 1994, she returned to South Africa, being employed by the South African Broadcasting Corporation until 2001.

In 2008, an unsent letter addressed to Sikakane from Nelson Mandela was discovered by a Nelson Mandela Foundation archivist.

Other Sikakane is among the writers featured in Margaret Busby's 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa.

Publications Autobiography

A Window on Soweto (IDAF, 1977)