Dora Tamana

Born: 11 November 1901
Died: 23 July 1983
Updated: 8 Mar 2022

Summary

Member of SACP, National Secretary of FSAW, member of the ANC Women’s League

Dora Tamana (nee Ntloko) was born in 1901 in Hlobo, Transkei, the eldest of seven children. Her childhood centred mainly on the many tasks demanded of a young girl growing up in rural South Africa. Tamana and her four sisters had to help work on their father’s plot, before and after school, where they cultivated potatoes, pumpkins, peas, cabbages, and chillies, as well as keeping some livestock. Every Saturday the girls would go to Idutywa, the nearest town, to sell their produce to make “money so that we could buy cookies and tea and so on”¦” (Tamana in Scanlon, 2007: 169).

How we know this

01Dora Tamana Biography: South African Communist Party [online] Available at: www.sacp.org.za[Accessed on 18 June 2009]
02Scanlon, H. (2007) “Dora Tamana and Mildred Ramakaba Lesiea” in Representation and Reality: Portraits of Women’s Lives in the Western Cape, 1948-1976. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council Press.

Last updated · 8 Mar 2022

Cite this entry

South African History Online. (2011, October 12). Dora Tamana. South African History Online. https://sahistory.org.za/ref/B-0068533

South African History Online (2011) ' Dora Tamana', South African History Online, 12 October. Available at: https://sahistory.org.za/ref/B-0068533 (Accessed: 22 July 2026).

South African History Online, Dora Tamana [website], https://sahistory.org.za/ref/B-0068533, (accessed 22 July 2026).

" Dora Tamana." South African History Online, 12 Oct. 2011, https://sahistory.org.za/ref/B-0068533. Accessed 22 July 2026.

South African History Online. " Dora Tamana." South African History Online. October 12, 2011. https://sahistory.org.za/ref/B-0068533.