Dora Tamana

Early life

Dora Ntloko was born at Gqamakwe, in Hlobo, Transkei, near Dutywa. Her grandfather was a Methodist preacher, but as a teen Dora converted, with her family, to the Israelite denomination. She was 20 when her father died in the 1921 Bulhoek massacre of Israelite sect members.

Career

After her father's death, Dora Ntloko moved to Queenstown, and after marriage and motherhood to Cape Town. During World War II, she lived in the Blouvlei settlement, where she became politically active with the Cape Flats Distress Association, resisting efforts to relocate the squatting residents. She joined the Communist Party in South Africa during this time, and soon the African National Congress Women's League.

Dora Tamana's particular interest was in self-help programs: a food committee, a women's sewing cooperative, a childcare program. She took a leadership role in the anti-pass movement in 1953, and in 1954 became National Secretary of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW). But in 1955, after attending the World Congress of Mothers in Switzerland with Lillian Ngoyi, she was banned by the South African government from attending political meetings.

Harassed by police and rezoned out of Blouvlei, she moved to Gugulethu. In her sixties, she served two jail sentences for her activism, and her son Bothwell was imprisoned and sentenced to death (he was later released, after Zimbabwe's independence). But she stayed active with women's protests into the 1970s, and spoke at the launching meeting of the United Women's Organisation in 1981. Her poem exhorted the next generations of South African women to unite and act together for change:

You who have no words, speak.
You who have no homes, speak.
You who have no schools, speak.
You who have to run like chickens from the vulture, speak.
Let us share our problems so that we can solve them together.
We must free ourselves.

Personal life

Dora Ntloko married another Bulhoek survivor, John Tamana. She had eight children; three of her children died in infancy. John Tamana left the family in 1948. Dora Tamana died in 1983, aged 82 years. A park in Cape Town was named for Dora Tamana, dedicated in 2015 by government official Nomaindia Mfeketo.