Myrtle Witbooi
South African trade unionist
Myrtle Witbooi (née Michels, 31 August 1947 – 16 January 2023) was a South African labour activist. She co-founded the first labour organisation for South African domestic workers, the South African Domestic Workers' Union, and served as general secretary of its successor, the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union, and as the first president of the global International Domestic Workers Federation.
Personal and work life
Witbooi was born in 1947 in the town of Genadendal, the daughter of a carpenter and a cook. She became a domestic worker in Cape Town when she was 17 and worked for a family for 12 years before leaving to become a shop steward in a factory. In 1973 she married Cedric Francois Witbooi, an electrical technician; they had three children. Classified as "coloured" under South Africa's apartheid laws, she had to live apart from her family while in domestic service. The couple parted in the 1980s because of her long hours in union work, and her husband predeceased her. After developing a rare form of bone cancer, she died in Cape Town in January 2023, at the age of 75.
Activism
After the Cape Town Clarion published a letter from her in 1971 objecting to the treatment of domestic workers, asking "Why are we not seen as people?", the newspaper facilitated the first organisational meeting for domestic workers in South Africa and invited her to address it. More than 300 people attended.
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This entry incorporates text from “Myrtle Witbooi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.