About this site

This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

Zille, Helen

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Helen Zille was once a political correspondent fighting for the rights to equal education of all South Africans. She later became the MEC for Education in the Western Cape, and has changed the minds and ways of her peers by letting nothing stand in the way of her vision of unity and equality.

Over the past 20 years Zille has actively fought for the causes of the Black Sash, End Conscription Campaign, South Africa Beyond Apartheid Project in 1986 and Cape Town Peace Committee. In this latter project she gathered evidence for the Goldstone Commission on the work of various forces seeking to destabilise the Western Cape before the 1994

democratic elections.

It is Zille's tendency to challenge orthodoxy, linked to an enthusiasm for creative thinking, that has changed the Cape schools system for the better.

She is now a leading member of the DA.

This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. Return to theThis resource is hosted by the site.