Amina Desai (c. 1920 – 10 June 2009) was South Africa's longest serving female Indian political prisoner.

[1] She served most of her sentence alongside the longtime ANC stalwart Dorothy Nyembe, and for a short while with Winnie Mandela, whose defiance and courage she greatly admired.

Intent on becoming a nurse, she enrolled herself in a school for midwifery, until she was unceremoniously taken home by her father five days later, who deemed it an unsuitable profession.

Desai was also owner of an agency for Watson's shoes, a large local brand; when he died in 1969, Amina immediately assumed control of her husband's business, undeterred by being a woman in a male-dominated profession, and ran it successfully for the next 35 years.

She left South Africa in 2004, as failing health brought her to live with her children in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where they had sought refuge from apartheid in the 1970s.