Ballinger, Margaret (1894–1980)

South African politician and a founding member of the Liberal Party. Born Violet Margaret Livingstone Hodgson in Scotland in 1894; died in 1980; at age ten, immigrated to South Africa with her parents; educated in Port Elizabeth, Wellington; University College of Rhodes, B.A.; Somerville College, Oxford, England, 1914; married William Ballinger.

For 22 years, Margaret Ballinger battled apartheid from her seat in the African National Congress (ANC). Born in Scotland, she immigrated to South Africa with her parents at the age of ten. She was a history lecturer at Witwaterstrand University (in Johannesburg) before meeting her husband William Ballinger, a Scottish trade unionist who had emigrated in 1928. After their marriage in the 1930s, they collaborated on a major study of the protectorates: Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Basutoland (now Lesotho), and Swaziland.

In 1937, Ballinger was drafted to run for one of four seats designated for nonwhite voters under the 1936 Representation of the Natives Act. Winning the Eastern Cape seat, she was reelected five times before her seat was eventually abolished by the Bantu Self-Government Act, which ended representation of Africans in the House and Senate.

Within the Congress, Ballinger was a founding member of the Liberal Party in 1953, and its first national chair. Affirming the "dignity of every human being, his right to develop, and his right to participate in political activities," she attacked racial discrimination and crusaded against apartheid. In addition to her political activities, she founded a home for crippled African children. The home was eventually closed by the Group Areas Act of 1950, which designated established segregated areas in which all Africans and other nonwhites were obliged to live. She was also instrumental in establishing scholarships for African students. At the end of her political career, Ballinger lectured briefly at the Australian Institute of International affairs, then began work on a major historical analysis, From Union to Apartheid: a Trek to Isolation, published in 1968.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts