Born in 1932, Irene Menell (nee Manderstam) spent her early life moving from one place to the next, completing her primary and secondary schooling in the United Kingdom (UK), Switzerland, and South Africa. After matriculating in 1949 at Kingsmead College in Johannesburg, Transvaal Province (now Gauteng), she enrolled at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where she obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1952 and followed up with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1954.

Nithianandan Ganese Govender (Elvis) was born on 1 November 1958 in Esperanza, a village on the south coast of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal – KZN), on the eastern seaboard of South Africa. The second of four children, he was the son of primary school teachers, Nora and Ganese Govender.

The Sweet Workers’ Union (SWU) originated as an offshoot of the short-lived Women Workers’ Union, founded by Fanny Klenerman in the mid-1920s, when that organisation fragmented as a result of its failure to comply with the legal definition of “trade union” as determined by law (Berger, 1992). The SWU, by 1941, was a fairly “weak and ineffective” organisation despite several years of organising efforts.

Harriet Ngubane was born in 1929 at Inchanga, a rural area near Pietermaritzburg, kwaZulu-Natal (KZN). She was brought up as a Roman Catholic but grew to embrace African-centred belief systems, including notions of how humanity and the world came into being. Ngubane was particularly fascinated with the centrality of the female figure, Nomkhubulwane, the goddess of fertility in Zulu cosmology.