Fatima Meer (12 August 1928 – 12 March 2010) was a South African writer, academic, screenwriter, and prominent anti-apartheid activist. Early life Fatima Meer was born in the Grey Streets of Durban, South Africa, into a middle-class family of nine, where her father Moosa Ismail Meer, a newspaper editor of The Indian Views, instilled in her a consciousness of the racial discrimination that existed in the country. Her mother was Rachel Farrell, the second wife of Moosa Ismail Meer. Her mother was orphaned and of Jewish and Portuguese descent. She converted to Islam and changed her name to Amina. When she was 16 years old in 1944, she helped raise £1 000 for famine relief in Bengal, India. She completed her schooling at the Durban Indian Girls High School. When she was still a student she mobilized students to found the Student Passive Resistance Committee to gather funds for the Indian community's passive resistance campaign from 1946 to 1948. The committee led her to meet Yusuf Dadoo, Monty Naicker, and Kesaveloo Goonam. She subsequently attended the University of the Witwatersrand for one year where she was a member of a Trotskyism group that was affiliated to Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). She went to the University of Natal, where she completed a Bachelor's degree and Master's degree in Sociology. Political activist Meer and Kesaveloo Goonam became the first women to be elected as executive of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in 1950. She helped to establish the Durban and District Women's League on 4 October 1952 as a group of 70 women. This organisation was started in order to build alliances between Africans and Indians as a result of the race riots between the two groups in 1949. Bertha Mkhize became the chairperson and she became the secretary of the league. The league undertook works such as organizing Child care and distributed milk at Cato Manor. This league also gather fund for victims caused by tornado at Springs where African became homeless and successfully collected £4000 for the Sea Cow Lake flood victims. After the National Party gained power in 1948 and started implementing their policy of apartheid. Meer's activism increased and as a result of her activism, Meer was first "banned" in 1952 for 3 years. She was one of the founding members of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) which was established on 17 April 1954 in the