AFP/Pretoria
Mamphela Ramphele, who formally entered opposition politics in South Africa on Saturday with a bid to unseat the ruling ANC, is a respected academic who fearlessly fought against white minority rule.
The one-time partner of late black consciousness founder Steve Biko, Ramphele has been an outspoken critic of the government on wide-ranging issues from education to corruption to health.
Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu has described her as “a brave and principled leader who has been ready to take costly stands for social justice”.
Born in 1947 near Polokwane to two teachers, Ramphele was exposed to political activism in the late 1960s while studying medicine, when she met Biko, a founder of the Black Consciousness Movement inspired by Malcolm X.
She was detained for five months without trial in the wake of the 1976 Soweto uprising, when police opened fire on student protesters from the black township, an incident whose tragic ending galvanised the anti-apartheid movement.
In 1977, she was served with a banning order and confined to the Tzaneen, an area she had never been to, in the northern Limpopo province.
That same year, Biko was killed while in police detention.
After his death, she gave birth to their son, Hlumelo, whose name means “the shoot growing from a dead tree trunk”.
He was her only surviving child with Biko. Their daughter, Lerato, died at two months of age in 1972.
She would have a second son, Malusi, from a short-lived marriage to Sipo Magele.
While exiled in Tzaneen, she set up a clinic at the backyard of a church and developed it into Ithuseng Community Health Centre, which is still operational today.
When her banning order was lifted in 1983, she completed a commerce degree.
She would go on to get a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town before being appointed vice chancellor of the institution, becoming not only the first black person, but also the first woman, to hold the post.
After that she worked as a managing director at the World Bank.
Since then she has served as chairman on a number of boards, including Gold Fields, one of the world’s largest gold producers. She has held other board member posts at Anglo American, Standard Bank and Medi-Clinic, one of the country’s largest chains of hospitals.
Ramphele, who often paints her nails a signature fire truck red, has also authored several books on social issues.
Openly critical of the ANC government, Ramphele said she never thought that she would have “to dust off my boots and struggle” hard for democracy after apartheid.
She also suggested South Africa would be a better democracy had Nelson Mandela served a second term as president.
“We would have had a better chance because he was a committed democrat,” she said.
In February, Ramphele launched Agang, a political movement whose name means “let’s build” in Sepedi. Five months later it became a party. Critics say she will likely appeal to a narrow constituency of educated urbanites, but she says her main target is the disaffected millions.