Charlotte Maxeke

Charlotte Makgomo Maxeke, born Mannya, entered the world on the seventh of April 1871 in Ga-Ramokgopa, in what is now the Limpopo province of South Africa. Her family later moved to Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape, where she was raised and schooled at mission stations, excelling in English, Dutch, mathematics, and above all music. Her gifts as a singer would carry her across oceans.

With the African Choir — remembered also as the African Jubilee Choir — she toured Britain from 1891, singing before Queen Victoria, and crossed to North America with the reconstituted choir in 1894. When that tour collapsed and the singers were stranded in Cleveland, Ohio, clergy of the African Methodist Episcopal Church took her in and opened the door to Wilberforce University. There she studied under the young W.E.B. Du Bois in her first years, and in 1901 earned her B.Sc. — the university's own records fix the year, though it is often given as 1903 — becoming the first Black South African woman to hold a university degree.

Returning home, she devoted her life to her people. She married Marshall Maxeke, a fellow Wilberforce graduate, and together in 1908 they founded the Wilberforce Institute at Evaton in the Transvaal. In 1918 she founded the Bantu Women's League, a grassroots movement that carried the grievances of poor and rural women and resisted the pass laws — the forerunner of the ANC Women's League. She led delegations, marches, and campaigns, and served as one of South Africa's earliest Black social workers in the Johannesburg courts.

She died in Johannesburg on the sixteenth of October 1939. Remembered as a mother of Black freedom in South Africa, Charlotte Maxeke opened doors that generations of women have since walked through with pride.