My mother, Adelaide Joseph, who has died aged 89, was an activist in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, before settling in London and continuing her fight with the Anti-Apartheid movement.
Born in Boksburg in the Transvaal, now called Mpumalanga, Adelaide grew up in Barberton in a Christian and deeply conservative Indian family. Her father, Manikum Ramiah Changelryan, was a gold miner, an unusual occupation for Indians –most miners were African. Her mother, Salome (nee Sebastian), was a homemaker who died when Adelaide was 15.
Adelaide went to the local Indian high school, then trained as a nurse at Barberton hospital, where she worked for a few years before she went to Johannesburg. There she met Paul Joseph, in 1957, and her life was transformed.
She had a sense of the injustice of apartheid from an early age, and Paul was a prominent political activist, a leading member of the Transvaal Indian Congress and the South African Communist party, and by then one of the 156 defendants, alongside leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, on trial for high treason. Indeed, their first “date” was Paul asking Adelaide to go to the Drill Hall to hear the court proceedings.
They married in 1958. Through Paul, Adelaide started to engage in political discourse and campaigning. Alongside her friend Winnie Mandela, she became active in the South African Federation of Women.
My parents’ lives were not easy – they had twins, one of whom, Anand, was disabled and needed constant care. Paul was often arrested, imprisoned, or working undercover for the liberation struggle. Life got much worse following the 1961 Sharpeville massacre, which prompted the establishment of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, of which Paul was a founder member.
Early in 1965 Adelaide took Anand to a specialist clinic in East Germany for what she thought was going to be a three-week trip. However, she would not be able to return to South Africa for 25 years. Paul had been arrested and was being tortured and she was persuaded by the ANC leadership to seek exile in London. Her daughters joined her that July having been smuggled out of the country, and Paul made his own escape later in the year.
Living initially in Notting Hill, then in Mill Hill East, she and Paul made a new life in exile. As well as raising her children, and later running a catering business, Adelaide campaigned ceaselessly for the liberation of South Africa. She maintained her life-long friendship with Winnie, and ensured that she and her daughters, Zeni and Zinzi, who regarded Adelaide as their aunt, were taken care of when almost everyone else had abandoned them.
It was only after the unbanning of the ANC in 1990 that Adelaide was able to visit South Africa, but she never returned permanently.
Anand died in 1970. Adelaide is survived by Paul, their daughters, Zoya, Nadia and me, four grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
