Where is Fatima Meer from? Fatima Meer, (born August 12, 1928, Durban, South Africa—died March 13, 2010, Durban), South African antiapartheid and human right’s activist, educator, and author. From the mid-20th century she was one of the most prominent women political leaders in South Africa. Meer was the second of nine children in a liberal Islamic family. Her father, Moosa Meer, was the editor of Indian Views, an anticolonialist newspaper that also opposed South Africa’s white-minority government. While a student at Durban Indian Girls’ High School, she organized the Student Passive Resistance Committee to support the Indian community’s Passive Resistance Campaign (1946–48) against new legislation restricting the land rights of Indians in South Africa. She later attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the University of Natal, where she received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology She married her first cousin, Ismail Meer, a lawyer and activist, in 1950. For her role as an organizer and speaker in the 1952 Defiance Campaign, a multiracial civil-disobedience protest against apartheid laws, she became the first woman in South Africa to be banned, a punishment that confined her to Durban and prohibited her attendance at public gatherings and the publication of her writings for three years. Despite her banning, she was a founding member of the Federation of South African Woman(FEDSAW) in 1954. Two years later she was appointed a lecturer in sociology at University of Natal, where she remained until 1988. She was the first nonwhite to teach at a white South African university. Fatima also came from a large extended family. It was a household that reflected a strong Gujarati-Indian and Muslim cultural ethos against a background of a first generation immigrant family struggling to survive in a racist society. From a young age Fatima started doing odd jobs to assist with the production of the family-owned newspaper, Indian Views. She learnt the power of the written and spoken word at an early age, and over the years developed a strong command of the English language, which helped her career as an academic, writer, Human Rights activist and political activist. Moosa valued education and ensured that all his children received formal education. Fatima was educated at Durban Indian Girls’ High School and subsequently completed her Bachelor’s and Masters degrees in Sociology at the University of Natal, a remarkable achievement at a time when few of her contemporaries achieved university education.