Lindiwe Mabuza (13 August 1938 – 6 December 2021) was a South African politician, diplomat, poet, academic, journalist, and cultural activist.
She was a patron of Dramatic Need, a United Kingdom–based charity that promotes creative arts for children, and was an advisory Council Member of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation.
Owing to her struggle to find employment in apartheid South Africa, Mabuza moved to Swaziland and became a teacher of English and Zulu.
She forged strong relationships with Scandinavians and was very close to the Prime minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, who was a major supporter of the ANC and resistance to the apartheid government.
[6] She had become such a formidable force against the apartheid government that on Monday, 8 September 1986, the ANC office was bombed with the hope of killing her and sabotaging the work she was doing.
[7] By the time Mabuza left Scandinavia, she had been so successful that the international offices of the ANC that she managed had grown to include Finland, Denmark, and Norway.
[9] She continued to lobby congress and to work with many American activists, such as Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda and many others.
Her efforts, with the help of other organizations and American colleges across America, led to Coca-Cola and many other such corporations withdrawing their investments from South Africa.
[13] Although Lindiwe Mabuza had spent many years in political exile, she was nominated into the first democratic parliament of South Africa serving under president Mandela.
In 2001, Mabuza took over from Cheryl Carolus as South African High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland,[16] a post she held till 2009.
[22][23] Mabuza's poems also appear in Anta Sudan Katara Mberi and Cosmo Pieterse's anthology Speak Easy, Speak Free (1977) and her poetry is included in Barry Feinberg's anthology Poets to the People: South African Freedom Poem (1980) and in The Heinemann Book of African Women's Poetry (1995).