At the height of Steve Biko's Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in 1975, Brigitte Sylvia Mabandla was among 44 people arrested in Durban during a swoop on activists celebrating the victory of the people of Mozambique. Led by among others, Samora Machel the People's Republic of Mozambique had been born on June 25 1971.
This new country had been "born as the fruit of the Mozambican people's unshakable will and iron determination to win back their freedom", said Machel at the time.
Years later when the BCM resolved to commemorate this historic moment in the struggle of Mozambique and the rest of the then colonised parts of Southern Africa, Mabandla, then a youth programme organiser for the SA Institute of Race Relations in Durban, heeded the call. She had to pay a heavy price for her commitment to the struggle. Her husband, Lindelwa Mabandla, had already been arrested three days before her arrest.
She was detained for five months and three weeks and was refused access to her five-month-old baby.
During her time in detention she was severely tortured by members of the Security Branch.
In 1996 former Durban security policeman, Col ARC Taylor applied for amnesty for the torture of Mabandla and five others arrested at the same time. The others were leading BCM figures at the time, Strini Moodley, Sathasivan Cooper, Lindani Muntu Myeza and Nyangana Absalom Cindi. Taylor died on November 11 1997, before his application for amnesty could be heard; Mabandla went on to contribute to the building of a new and just SA.
Mabandla was born on November 23 1948, the year the Nationalist Party officially introduced state-funded racism.
Early in her professional career, Mabandla was moved by the need to disturb apartheid's comfort zones.
It was while she was with the Institute of Race Relations in Durban for instance, that she defied the Group Areas Act and initiated a racially mixed winter school programme. The idea was "to enable children from all racial groups to interact and participate in educational programmes", she notes. This was a huge task at the time given the politics, the racial mistrust on both sides and the ambiguous apartheid laws.
Today it is no exaggeration to describe Mabandla's dignified rise to important political office as meteoric. She has served as minister of justice and constitutional development since April 2004. Only a year before she had proved herself a very capable minister of housing.
