Lilian Ngoyi Passes On
On 13 March 1980, a 68-year-old anti-apartheid revolutionary activist and founder member of the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL), Lilian Ngoyi, passed on. Ngoyi was living as a restricted person at the time, and had developed a heart condition, which led to hear death. She joined the ANC and eventually helped found the party’s women wing, ANCWL. In 1956, Ngoyi led a march against pass laws for women to the Union Buildings and personally knocked on Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom’s door to hand over the petitions.
“Mma Ngoyi”, as Lilian Masediba Matabane Ngoyi was affectionately referred to, was born on 25 September 1911, in Bloed Street, Pretoria, the only daughter of Annie and Isaac Matabane, and was a sister to three brothers. Ngoyi’s mother worked as a washerwoman and her father was a mineworker. She attended Kilnerton Primary School until Standard Two and in 1928, she moved to Johannesburg to train as a nurse at City Deep Mine Hospital. Here, she met and married a van driver, John Gerard Ngoyi, in 1934 and they had a daughter, Edith Ngoyi. Unfortunately, Lilian Ngoyi’s husband died in a motor car accident in 1937, leaving her alone with their three-year old daughter.
Ngoyi joined the Garment Workers Union (GWU) under Solly Sachs and soon became one of its leading figures. Impressed by the spirit of ANC volunteers, she joined the ANC during the 1952 Defiance Campaign and was arrested for disobediently using facilit
