Limpho Hani
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Limpho Hani | |
|---|---|
| Member of the National Assembly | |
| In office May 1994 – August 1999 | |
| Succeeded by | Kay Moonsamy |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Limpho Sekamane 31 January 1948 |
| Citizenship | South Africa |
| Party | African National Congress |
| Spouse | |
Limpho Hani (née Sekamane; born 31 January 1948) is a Mosotho–South African activist who is the widow of anti-apartheid activist Chris Hani. After her husband was assassinated in 1993, she had her own brief political career in the post-apartheid government, representing the African National Congress (ANC) in the National Assembly from May 1994 to August 1999. She also served on the ANC's National Executive Committee during that period. She has since remained in the public eye, partly because of the national symbolic importance of her husband's murder and partly because of her own activism in seeking to oppose parole for the killers.[1][2]
Life with Chris Hani: 1973–1993
She married Chris Hani in 1974 at a magistrate's court in Lusaka, Zambia; they had a celebratory wedding lunch at Wimpy.[7] After her wedding, Hani spent time studying overseas in Yugoslavia, but upon her return to Southern Africa in late 1975,[5] she and her husband moved into a house in Lithabaneng in the suburbs of Maseru; the house came to be known to ANC members as "Moscow House".[6] The couple had three daughters together: Neo, Nomakhwezi, and Lindiwe.[8] Nomakhwezi died aged 23 in 2001.[9][10]
Hani's husband was a senior leader in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), and the South African Communist Party (SACP); the organisations were at that time operating in exile in Southern Africa – primarily out of Lusaka – because they were banned by the apartheid government in South Africa. Hani herself worked for the Lesotho Tourism Board, but she also became increasingly involved in MK operations;[11] after the 1976 Soweto Uprising swelled the ANC's numbers, she was personally involved in smuggling new MK recruits across the South African border and through Swaziland.[5] She was detained by the South African authorities for several months in 1977–1978 and during that time, according to her husband's biographer Hugh Macmillan, she gave evidence for the apartheid state against Mountain Qumbela, a former ANC leader in the Cape.[5]
Hani's husband was subject to an assassination attempt in 1982, and in the aftermath she left her job at the Lesotho Tourism Board to move with him to Lusaka.[12] She returned to Maseru in 1984 and took up employment with the local office of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and then, from 1985, at the Swedish Embassy in Maseru.[12] Hani and her family moved to South Africa in 1990 after the ANC was unbanned during the negotiations to end apartheid. During an advanced stage of the negotiations, on 10 April 1993, Chris Hani was assassinated outside their home in Dawn Park in Boksburg; his teenage daughter Nomakhwezi was with him.[13]