Fatima Meer

Meer, a newspaper editor of TIV(The Indian View),[1] instilled in her a consciousness of the racial discrimination that existed in the country.

She subsequently attended the University of the Witwatersrand for one year where she was a member of a Trotskyism group that was affiliated to Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM).

[9] At the same year, she organized a committee to gather funds for bail and support the families of Natal political leaders who were in the treason trial.

[6] In the 1960s, Meer organised night vigils to protest against the mass detention of anti-apartheid activists without trial outside Durban prison.

[10] During the 1970s, Meer started to embrace Black Consciousness Ideology with South African Student Organisation (SASO) led by Steve Biko.

The banning order came after she attended a meeting of the Black Studies Programme where she was a key speaker with a speech entitled "Twenty-Five Years of Apartheid Rule".

[12] She narrowly survived an assassination attempt shortly after her release from detention in 1976 when she was shot at her family home in Durban, but not harmed.

[14] In May 1999, Meer founded the Concerned Citizens' Group (CCG) to persuade Indian people not to vote for white parties in the next election.

[3] She was a strong supporter of the Iranian Revolution and boycotted Salman Rushdie's trip to South Africa in 1998, claiming that he was a blasphemer.

Meer also founded and became a leader of Natal Education Trust which gather money from the Indian community to build schools in Umlazi, Port Shepstone and Inanda.

[17] During the 1980s, she organised scholarships for ten students to go to United States and assisted the "SAVE OUR HOMES COMMITTEE"  which was founded by the Coloured community of Sparks Estate to seek justice for who were threatened by the Durban Municipality whom wanted to take their homes.They succeeded gain the compensation for the act.

[6] Through the cooperation with Indira Gandhi, she organized scholarship for South African students to study medicine and the political sciences in India.

[3] IBR does tutorial programmes to improve the low matric pass rate and Phambili High was founded in 1986 for African students.

[15] In 1992,(2 years before the first democratic election) Fatima Meer founded the Clare Estate Environment Group as a response to the needs of shack dwellers and rural migrants.