Mavivi Myakayaka-Manzini (born 19 January 1956), also known as Mavivi Manzini, is a South African politician and diplomat who is currently the South African High Commissioner to Malawi. She was a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) between 1994 and 2007 and she was deputy president of the ANC Women's League between 2003 and 2008. During apartheid, she worked in exile in the secretariat of the ANC's women's section; in the 2000s, after one term in the national Parliament (1994–1999), she headed the ANC's international relations desk.
Early life and education
Yvette Lillian Mavivi Myakayaka was born on 19 January 1956 in Alexandra on the outskirts of Johannesburg in what was then the Transvaal (now Gauteng province) and spent most of her childhood in Soweto. Her parents were teachers and were members of the African National Congress (ANC) until it was banned by the apartheid government in 1960. As a child, between roughly age four and age six, she was hospitalised with polio and was left disabled, with a permanent limp. She became politically active as a teenager in about 1973, joining the Black Consciousness-aligned South African Students' Movement while still in high school. After her arrival at the University of the North (Turfloop) in 1975, she was active in the South African Students' Organisation, which was banned on the campus at the time. Also around 1975, she became involved in the ANC underground, helping to establish a covert ANC unit on the Turfloop campus which assisted members of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, in particular with reconnaissance.
The Soweto uprising began in the middle of Myakayaka-Mavivi's second year in 1976 and she was detained in July for her political activity. In October 1976, after two months in detention, she left South Africa via Botswana to avoid further security police attention and join the ANC in exile. She studied political science, sociology, and development studies at the University of Zambia and received a Bachelor's degree in 1979. Later, in 1989, she received a Master's degree in development studies, specialising in gender and development, from the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague, the Netherlands.
Early political career
After receiving her Bachelor's, Myakayaka-Manzini became a full-time member of the secretariat of the Women's Section of the ANC, then based in Lusaka, Zambia. From 1981 she was editor of the Voice of Women magazine, the primary propaganda organ of the Women's Section, working alongside Marion Sparg and others. She also broadcast on the ANC's Radio Freedom and was a founding member of the Congress of African Women, later known as the Pan African Women's Congress. After completing her Master's in the Netherlands, she moved to Tanzania, where her husband was the ANC's chief representative.
When the ANC was unbanned by the South African government in 1990, Myakayaka-Manzini returned to South Africa and worked at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, conducting research on gender-related topics. From 1990 to 1992, she also headed the Johannesburg branch of the ANC Women's League, which was then being re-established inside South Africa. From 1992, she was a member of the ANC delegation to the negotiations that ended apartheid and devised a new post-apartheid constitution; she and Baleka Mbete represented the Women's League on the delegation. In 1993 and 1994, she was a member of the sub-council on the status of women in the multi-party Transitional Executive Council that oversaw the transition away from apartheid.
In 1997, Myakayaka-Manzini applied for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in relation to her work for the ANC in exile. Hers was part of a batch of applications submitted jointly by the ANC on behalf of a group of members and leaders who collectively took responsibility for policy decisions that they acknowledged had led to human rights violations committed by ANC cadres. The commission refused amnesty to her and the other applicants on the grounds that they had not disclosed any specific act, in which they individually had been involved, for which they would be required to seek amnesty.