Sonja Schlesin

Sonja Schlesin (6 June 1888 – 6 January 1956) was a Russian-born South African best known for her work with Mohandas Gandhi while he was living in South Africa. She began her service as his secretary at the age of 17. By her early twenties, she had become entrusted with the executive decision making within Gandhi's law practice and sociopolitical movements. Gandhi said "during the Satyagraha days ... she led the movement single handed".

Life Born in 1888 to a Russian-Jewish family in Moscow, Schlesin moved to South Africa with her parents Isidor and Helena Dorothy Schlesin (neé Rosenberg) in 1892. By the age of fifteen, she had matriculated at the University of the Cape of Good Hope, which was the city where her family lived. She was recommended for a job by the architect Hermann Kallenbach to a new immigrant Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi. She affectionately called her employer Gandhi 'Bapu' (Father).

Gandhi would take on large administrative and important tasks. In 1904 he persuaded the authorities to rehouse gold mine workers in the Transvaal where the pneumonic plague was taking a toll. Gandhi had taken on the problem and his legal office team had been reassigned to nursing for the sick. The workers' old houses had to be burnt and the dispossessed had only the money that they had buried for safekeeping. Gandhi became their banker and took in about £60,000. This needed to be accounted for so that he could successfully return it several years later.

In 1908 the South African government introduced the "Restriction Act" which was further legal discrimination and was known as the "Black Act". It was Schlesin who wrote a speech for herself to give to 2,500 protesters and asked her parents for permission to deliver it. In the end, it was Gandhi who delivered it, but it was Schlesin's speech that challenged the people "to give up all, aye very life itself, for the noble cause of country and religion". The Chinese community awarded Schlesin a gold watch and the Indian community gave her ten pounds. In April 1909, the High Court in Pretoria "declined to depart from the universal practice, which precluded the admission of ladies as attorneys..."

In 1913 Gandhi led striking South African miners on a great march to protest their conditions and the lack of respect shown to them. This was a bold move as Gandhi was relying on his own finances and the good will of the community to prevent the marchers from suffering hunger. The strike was staged in response to taxation specifically targeting Indian miners who refused to leave South Africa upon the completion of their employment. The support of Kallenbach and Schlesin was instrumental due to their ability to capitalize on their "white credentials" to muster support from the greater Anglo community, while further using the same status as protection from arrest and prosecution.

After Gandhi left Gandhi returned to Britain in 1914 and Schlesin decided to remain in South Africa despite Gandhi's profuse thanks to her at farewell dinners in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. Schlesin enrolled at the University College of Johannesburg which she funded with a loan that Gandhi arranged. By 1924 she had earned two degrees of the first class, a Bachelor and Master of Arts, respectively, from the University of Witwatersrand. Schlesin became a well respected but eccentric teacher of Latin at a high school in Krugersdorp for over 20 years with only two students having ever failed her course. Despite this record she was never promoted and this may have been due to frictions with her faculty authorities. She stood up for her beliefs and would astound students by returning Christmas presents that were given to her.