Trevor Manuel: anti-apartheid activist to government minister

Abstract

During the apartheid era, Trevor Andrew Manuel took on a variety of roles in the antiapartheid movement inside the country, beginning while he was at school in the mid-1970s and picking up pace in the 1980s, culminating in his ascension to the leadership of the liberation movement. The experiences he gained from these roles eventually propelled him into the economic elite and the position of government minister in the new democracy, despite a modest working-class background and a relatively limited tertiary education. The decision at an early age to participate in organisations defying apartheid and the range of activities he engaged in subsequently are evidence of a significant contribution to the quest for social justice in this country. Manuel was born in the Cape Town coloured suburb, Kensington, on 31 January 1956. His father, Abraham Manuel, worked for the Cape Town City Council, and his mother, Euphemia 'Philma' Manuel (nee van Sohnen), was a garment worker. The family lived in a threebedroomed semi-detached house his father had purchased. Other family members living in the house were Manuel's three sisters and his two grandmothers. Manuel started schooling at Windermere Preparatory School three weeks before his fifth birthday in 1961. The class in his first year at school was racially mixed, and included Xhosa-speaking children. In the same year, the last African families living in Kensington were forcefully moved out of the area in terms of the Group Areas Act. At the age of 12, in 1968, Manuel started at Wesley Practising and Secondary School, an English-medium school, in Salt River. He began to learn English at the school, which had been established by educators in the region drawn from the South African Coloured People's Congress (SACPC) and the Teachers and Educational Professional Association, an older and more conservative version of the Trotskyite Teachers' League of South Africa.