1910 - 1984

Founding Executive Committee Member of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), Treason Trial defendant, Chairperson of the Cape Town ANC Women's League

Annie Silinga was born in 1910 in the Butterworth municipality in the Eastern Cape. She only completed a few years of primary school, but became involved in politics at an early age.

She had a strong relationship with her father who identified her early on as a future leader. She married in 1936 and a year later moved to Cape Town where her husband had found employment. They settled in Langa, where Annie Silinga immediately became involved in local politics.

Throughout her life, Silinga was a fearless anti-pass campaigner and women's leader who defied the apartheid regime by refusing to carry a pass. Her courage in the face of abuse by the state inspired many local communities to similarly resist state oppression and control.

She participated in the historic Women's March to Pretoria in 1956, and was among 156 women and men charged with high treason during the Treason Trial that same year. Following her release from the trial in 1957, she was elected president of the Cape Town ANC Women's League in 1958. In 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre of March that year, she was jailed during the five-month State of Emergency.

For her defiant refusal to carry a pass, she was harassed and regularly arrested. Rather than accept the state pension to which she was entitled on condition that she complied, she chose instead to die in poverty in 1984, never having carried a pass.