SAROJINI DEVI GOVENDER

Durban teacher and Natal Indian Congress activist who hid freedom fighters in her kitchen

Aunty Saro always dated her political life from the morning the bulldozers came. It was 1958, she was a young teacher in Cato Manor, and she watched her neighbours, Indian and African, carry their furniture onto trucks while officials read out numbers. She decided on the spot that she would never again watch quietly.

Born in Cato Manor in 1935, Sarojini was the daughter of a market gardener and a seamstress. She attended local schools, trained at Springfield College of Education in Durban, and began teaching mathematics and English in 1956. In the same year, aged twenty-one, she joined the Natal contingent of the women's march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, carrying sandwiches for the older women and a petition for herself.

Over the next four decades she taught at schools in Cato Manor and Chatsworth, where her family were resettled in 1964, and was an active member of the Natal Indian Congress. She was detained for three weeks during the 1960 State of Emergency, and in the 1980s her kitchen in Chatsworth became a place where young activists from the United Democratic Front could eat, plan and, on three occasions, sleep unseen. She never kept a diary, saying that a good activist remembered everything and wrote nothing down.

She married Rajoo Govender in 1958, a union organiser who died in 1998. After retiring in 1995 she volunteered at the Phoenix Settlement, giving tours to schoolchildren about the town's history. She loved chilli bites, Bollywood musicals, her marigold-bright garden, and Sunday prayers at the Chatsworth temple.

Aunty Saro died peacefully at home in May 2022. She leaves her daughter Priya, her son Mahesh, her sister Kamla and six grandchildren.

“A good activist remembers everything and writes nothing down.”