Charlotte Manye Maxeke
Charlotte Maxeke was one of the first black South Africans to fight for freedom from exploitative and social conditions for African women. She called for political unity across gender and racial barriers. Born in the eastern Cape, where a black political elite of mission-educated Africans was beginning to emerge, Charlotte went to the USA in 1896, where she studied at the Wilberforce University in Ohio with the famous civil rights leader WEB Du Bois. She graduated with a B.Sc degree and then returned to South Africa in 1901 as South Africa's first black woman graduate.
She married the Rev. MM Maxeke, a prominent AME minister who had also been educated overseas, and subsequently she began to write in Xhosa on the ‘woman question' in Umteteli wa Bantu. Her main concerns were church-linked social issues, rather than political resistance, but Charlotte was politically active throughout her adult life. She was an early opponent of passes for black women, and was an organizer of the anti-pass movement in Bloemfontein in 1913. She was elected as the first president of the Bantu Women's League, the early forerunner of the ANC Women's League, and led a women's deputation to Cape Town in 1918 to put the women's case to the prime minister, Louis Botha.
Charlotte Manye Maxeke
biography
