The Sweet Workers’ Union

The Sweet Workers’ Union (SWU) originated as an offshoot of the short-lived Women Workers’ Union, founded by Fanny Klenerman in the mid-1920s, when that organisation fragmented as a result of its failure to comply with the legal definition of “trade union” as determined by law (Berger, 1992). The SWU, by 1941, was a fairly “weak and ineffective” organisation despite several years of organising efforts.

Harriet Ngubane

Harriet Ngubane was born in 1929 at Inchanga, a rural area near Pietermaritzburg, kwaZulu-Natal (KZN). She was brought up as a Roman Catholic but grew to embrace African-centred belief systems, including notions of how humanity and the world came into being. Ngubane was particularly fascinated with the centrality of the female figure, Nomkhubulwane, the goddess of fertility in Zulu cosmology.

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