Bertha Nonkumbi Gxowa was born in Germiston on 28 November 1934. She started schooling at Thokoza Primary School and completed her Junior Certificate in 1950. In 1952, she enrolled at Melville Commercial College and completed a course in typing and bookkeeping. Bertha was married to the late Cecil Mntukanti Gxowa, and has five children.

In the early 1950s, she became involved in politics and with the unions. She joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1951.

She was one of the leaders and organisers of the 1956 Women's Anti-Pass March. She was a defendant in the Treason Trail (1956-1961). In 1960 she was banned for 11 years under the Suppression of Communism Act. In 1968, she was served with a second restriction order. Her second restriction order expired in 1973, by which time she was no longer actively involved in the ANC. She became involved in church activities and in 1985 she also founded a women's club called Malibongwe Women’s Development Organisation (non-profit organisation).

The majority of the club members are community volunteers assisting the South African National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (SANCA). After February 1990 she organised and rebuilt the ANC's Katlehong branch together with Khetsi Lehoko, Hazzy Sibanyoni, John Nonjeke and Moses Molane, all from the Congress of South African Trade Unions. By August 1990, Katlehong became the biggest branch in the country with 1900 members.

After our first democratic election in 1994, she became a member of the National Assembly of Parliament. She served as a member of the Home Affairs and Health parliamentary portfolio committees from 1994 to 2004. She has been a member of the Foreign Affairs Parliamentary Portfolio Committee since 2005. She also serves as the ANC Women's League national treasurer and Gauteng chairperson of the Women’s League.  At the same time, she works as a community volunteer for SANCA.

Bertha spends much of her free time doing humanitarian work e.g.  helping people who are suffering from HIV / AIDS, orphans and street children.  As a director of Imuniti (a manufacturer and marketer of pharmaceutical products and complimentary natural medicines as well as high protein and fortified powdered nutritional food products and supplements), she is also responsible for other programmes e.g. the training and deployment of home based care workers caring for HIV/ AIDS patients in informal settlements, rural areas and the poor in South Africa. 

For more information, follow these links

• The predidency
• Whoswhosa
• SA history

Winnie Madikizela was born on 26 September 1936 in Bizana, Transkei – now known as part of the Eastern Cape of South Africa. She was one of eight siblings and her mother, Nomathamsanqa Mzaidume taught Home Economics at a local school. Winnie experienced her first loss at the tender age of eight when her mother died. Her father worked in the Forestry and Agriculture department of the Transkei government.

Winnie attended primary school in Bizana and completed her school career in Shawbury. She received a diploma in social work at the Jan Hofmeyer School in Johannesburg, Gauteng.

Winnie had drive and ambition even in those early years, remember this was during the apartheid years and during a time when women were still oppressed in South Africa: she was both black and female. Yet she managed to complete a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in Inter-national Relations, at one of the leading universities in South Africa, The University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg.

Her family was better off than most black people in South Africa in those years and during this time she was unaware of the inequality that was so rampant among black people. It was only when she worked at the Baragwanath Hospital as a social worker (she was the very first black social worker, male or female) that she became acutely aware of the huge gap between the privileged white minority and the terrible levels of poverty that the black people were subjected to. She noticed how bad the medical services were for ill black people and even completed a project that included research that showed than ten out one thousand black babies died during birth. Deaths that need not have happened.

During this time, she met young people from the African National Congress and her political voice was first heard in the nineteen-fifties and she was arrested and detained as a political prisoner for the first time in 1958. This did not deter her and she was heavily involved with encouraging the women of South Africa to stand up and refuse to be subjected to the laws of apartheid.

It was through her friendship with Adelaide Tsukudu that she met Adelaide's fiancé Oliver Tambo, and they introduced her to a prominent lawyer and member of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League, Nelson Mandela. They got married and during the years gave birth to children. Even in the early years of their marriage, she had to learn to survive on her own, as Mandela toured different townships, passing on the anti-apartheid message.

Mandela was then on trial along with 156 other people in the now infamous "treason trial" lasting from August 1958 to March 1961. It is from this period that Winnie Madikizela's devotion to the welfare of ordinary people matured from efforts to help people cope with the extreme hardship of their lives to efforts to challenge and transform the governmental structures and social relations which created and reproduced hardship for the majority population.

After his arrest and imprisonment in 1962, she was banned this meant that she became a prisoner within Soweto, the largest township in South Africa. In typical Winnie style, she ignored the ban and visited her husband, Nelson, in prison in Cape Town in 1967. Her reward for this was one month's jail.

Over the years she was banned and jailed. At one time she was put into solitary confinementon the death row, probably, the then government's Endeavour to weaken her beliefs. One wonders how the children coped with an absent father and a mother who was victimized in this way. After her release form a Kroonstad prison in 1975, she was part of the newly formed African National Congress Women’s League, a movement that till today has a powerful political voice. It was not long before the Women’s League was banned as well this did not deter Winnie and her female comrades, they continued to struggle against the apartheid laws.

Winnie was involved with the Soweto 1976 uprising and was sentenced to jail again, this time she had to spend half a year in prison and after her release she was not allowed to go back to Soweto. Once again, her home was tilted upside down.

The South African government re-stationed her in the town of Brandfort and there she remained for nine years,enduring assaults on her house and received numerous death threats. Being the strong woman that she was, she again ignored her banning order and left Brandfort for visits to Soweto – for this she was arrested each time and had to spend time in jail.

Nelson Mandela divorced Winnie Mandela and when he was inaugurated as first democratically-elected president of South Africa, one of his daughters was by his side. Winnie wasn't even invited to share with the podium and immediate interior of the celebrations that were held on that day, not until Thabo Mbeki (Nelson's successor) personally invited her to sit with him and his wife. Winnie had found a way to survive again.

Against all expectations, she had been re-elected chairperson of the ANC Women's League several times and her voice is still a strong one. She despises the press who understandably relish any opportunity to elaborate on her lifestyle. Winnie Madikizela- Mandela, has spent a lifetime being victimized and oppressed.

• Biography for Winnie

Further articles on Winnie Madikizela- Mandela

• Answers.com
• Bookrags