Faith Gasa

Faith Gasa was born on 1 January 1945 in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State (now Free State Province). She graduated  with a diploma in nursing in 1967. Gasa attained a Bachelor of Arts scholarship to study at the University of Zululand, Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) from 1968 to 1972. She then went on to study History and Afrikaans in 1972. It was at the university that she met Enoch Gasa, who eventually became her husband. She was a student activist in the Inkatha movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi that was later formed into the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). She is a teacher by profession and was elected life president of the Natal Teachers Union.

In 1973 she moved to the town of Vryheid in Northern KwaZulu-Natal where he taught at Ikhethelo High School. From 1975 she became a member of the IFP. In 1991, she was appointed secretary of the political party. Gasa was also the chairperson of the IFP Women’s Brigade, and led the Brigade into peace talks with their counterparts in the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) in a bid to spearhead peace initiatives during a series of violent clashes between the political parties.

She was also a member of the IFP delegation to the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) negotiations at the World Trade Centre, Johannesburg, Transvaal (now Gauteng) and was on the steering committee of the National Women’s Coalition. Gasa was an IFP Member of Parliament in the National Assembly, where she was deputy chair of a number of parliamentary committees, before departing for the Kwazulu-Natal provincial legislature in 1995.

In 2000 she was appointed by the then Premier of KwaZulu-Natal, Lionel Mtshali, as the Minister of Education and Culture in KwaZulu-Natal. She was hospitalized for a long time and passed away on 4 August 2005 at the age of 60 years old in Richards Bay, Kwazulu-Natal.