Emma Thandi Mashinini
Emma Thandi Mashinini (most people call her Tiny) was awarded the Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2010 Top Women Awards which took place at the Sandton Convention centre on Thursday 9th September 2010.
She was born in Rosettenville, Johannesburg in 1929. In the early 1930s, she and her family were forcibly removed to Orlando in Soweto; however her parents managed to relocate to Sophiatown where Tiny attended the Bantu Secondary School. However it was not long after their arrival that their homes were flattened by bulldozers and people were forcibly moved back to Soweto.
Her parents separated when Tiny was 14, and she was forced to drop out of school and go to work. At age 17, she married, and went on to give birth to six children, three of whom sadly died in infancy. When her youngest child was two years of age, Tiny took on a full-time job working in a clothing factory, and joined the Garment Workers’ Union (GWU), which was then headed by Lucy Mbuvelo. Tiny was also present at the Congress of the People in Kliptown in 1955.
At the factory, her co-workers soon elected her as a shop steward, and she was later appointed floor supervisor by management. She worked tirelessly to reduce the long working hours from 45 to 40 hours, and after months of strikes and go-slows, she won the right for workers to have unemployment insurance.
After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, political organisations were banned and many union leaders were forced to go underground or into exile. But Tiny didn’t. She chose to stay and fight the cause! During this time, she was elected to the national executive committee of the National Union of Clothing Workers (NUCW), the highest body of the Garment Workers Union.
Tiny was thus placed in a position of considerable importance. She remained a member of this committee for the next 12 years, and during this time she met and married her second husband, Tom Mashinini.
In 1975, she took up a position as president of a new union, the Commercial, Catering and Allied Worker's Union of South Africa (CCAWUSA) that she had to set up from scratch.
Of course this was very trying times and Tiny was arrested in November 1981 under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act and spent the next six months in solitary confinement at Pretoria Central Prison. After her release from prison in 1982, she once again defied advice to live abroad and instead she stayed and resumed her post at CCAWUSA for another four years.
Mashinini wrote a book, “Strikes have Followed me all my Life”, about her experiences in Pretoria Central Prison, Jeppe police station, and her interrogation at John Vorster Square.
In 1985, Mashinini was involved in the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), a body that then united all trade unions across the country.
In 1986, she was appointed director of the Anglican Church’s Department of Justice and Reconciliation. In this role, she dealt closely with the families of detainees, who had been incarcerated during the state of emergency.
In the early 1990s, she became the president of the Mediation and Conciliation Centre in Johannesburg and was appointed commissioner for the Restitution of Land Rights in 1995.
Mashinini was awarded the National Order of Luthuli in Bronze for her contribution to the building of the trade union movement.
Tiny, we salute you!
