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DR FATIMA Meer died last Friday, at the age of 82, following a stroke she suffered two weeks ago. Her death brings to a close a remarkable life: a courageous, selfless, independent-minded scholar-activist, never afraid to speak out and always ready to act on her words. Her legacy, however, is bound to carry on through her vast accomplishments, for which in 2007 Rhodes University awarded her the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature.

Meer has been described as “a redoubtable fighter and doughty champion of the underclass”; as “dynamite in a small package”; as “the most popular and recognisable Indian South African Muslim woman over the past five decades”; and as “a true Gandhian”.

Indeed she has emulated Gandhi’s politics of self-sacrifice; and she has combined oppositional activism with a politics of bridge-building and human development in the true style of Gandhi.

2006 marked the 60th anniversary of the 1946 Indian passive resistance campaign directed against segregationist legislation restricting Indian property-holding in Natal. The campaign had been launched in March 1946 at a 6 000-strong gathering.

Among the speakers were political heavyweights like Monty Naicker – but also a 17-year-old Durban high school student who would not only deliver an address but walk alongside Indian leaders at the head of the protest march. This young student was Fatima Meer.

She would also establish a Student Passive Resistance Committee – and in so doing embark on a remarkable life of activism. In 2006, to mark the 60th anniversary of this campaign a special commemorative event was held in Durban, attended by the Prime Minister of India. Meer was the special guest at the commemoration.

Her activism and public engagement over the six decades has taken different forms – often oppositional, sometimes aimed at bridge-building, at other times developmental.

In the 1950s, still at a young age, she became an executive member of the Natal Indian Congress, and would share political platforms with such renowned figures as Yusuf Dadoo. She founded, early in that decade, the Durban and District Women’s League in an effort to restore relations between Indians and Africans – relations which had broken down during the Cato Manor violence of 1949.

Not surprisingly, over the three decades from the 1950s when apartheid was at its height, much of Meer’s activism was oppositional. She was a founder member of the Federation of South African Women, which in 1956, soon after its establishment, organised the famous women’s march to Pretoria in protest against the imposition of pass laws on women. She campaigned in the 1950s and 1960s against group areas removals, and against detention without trial.

While maintaining a wholehearted commitment to the anti-apartheid cause, Fatima threw herself into community-oriented, developmental work – going back to 1944 when as a 16-year-old she raised £1 000 for famine relief in Bengal, and when still a teenager established literacy classes for adult Africans in her father’s garage in Durban.

A long list of such activity follows: in the 1970s founding and heading the Natal Education Trust which raised enough funds to build five schools in African townships; leading rescue operations for 10 000 Indian flood victims after the Umgeni River burst its banks; in the 1980s organising scholarships for African students to attend higher education institutions in South Africa, India and the US; founding in 1986 the Phambili High School in three centres with an initial enrolment of over 3 000 students.

In 1996 she conducted sewing and literacy classes for women in informal settlements. Later she established the Concerned Citizens’ Group to help council tenants threatened with eviction. The list goes on.

Meer was one of those rare persons able to combine an extraordinary life of social and political activism with an outstanding academic career. For over 30 years she taught in the sociology department of what was the University of Natal.

She wrote over 20 books, and edited almost 20 others. Among these are books about two of the most revered, iconic figures of the 20th century – Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Her biography of Mandela has been published in 13 languages.

More recently she saw through to publication the autobiography of her beloved husband, Ishmael Meer, who died in 2000 before the work could be completed. Among her sociological works is an important book on race and suicide. Add to this a script for a film on Gandhi, and another script about the Taj Mahal.

One might imagine that somebody who has led such an active, productive life as this would have been able to go about their business without hindrance or constraint. Not so at all with Meer.

In 1954 she was one of the first South Africans, and the first woman, to be placed under a banning order – a two- year banning which confined her to Durban and prevented her from attending gatherings. She would spend 12 years of her life under such orders, being banned again from 1976 to 1985.

At one time she and her son, Rashid, and her son-in- law, Bobby, were all banned. They had to get special government permission to talk to each other.

In 1976 she was detained without trial for six months after trying to organise a rally with Steve Biko. Soon after her release from prison she survived an assassination attempt. There would also be two arson attacks on her Durban home.

A South African of international renown she was accorded due recognition around the world: a 1990 award from the American Muslim Council for her struggle against oppression and racial discrimination; awards in India in 1994 and 2003 – one for her contribution to human rights, another for promoting the prestige of India and for fostering the interests of Indians overseas. At the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004 she served as one of six distinguished international jurors for the World Court of Women on US War Crimes.

In 2007 the late Denis Brutus, the writer and long-time anti-apartheid activist, wrote a poem for her, simply entitled For FM. It reads:

It is in the face of endurance

In the face of disappointment

In the face of betrayal

That her quality shines clear.

It is in endurance

That her quality shines

In that steadiness

Unfailing brightness

That her starry quality

Shows clear,

Shows clear.

Professor Paul Maylam is head of the history department at Rhodes University and also the University’s Public Orator. - By PAUL MAYLAM