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).
Dora Tamana Biography: South African Communist Party [online] Available at: www.sacp.org.za[Accessed on 18 June 2009]|Scanlon, 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.