Baleka Mbete (born 24 September 1949) is a South African politician who was the Deputy President of South Africa from September 2008 to May 2009. She was also the Speaker of the National Assembly for two non-consecutive terms from 2004 to 2008 and from 2014 to 2019. A member of the African National Congress (ANC), she was first elected to the National Assembly in 1994 and stepped down from her seat in 2019.
Born in KwaZulu-Natal, Mbete is a teacher by training and a former anti-apartheid activist, initially through the Black Consciousness Movement. Between 1976 and 1990, she was stationed with the ANC in exile outside South Africa; during this period, she was also a prominent cultural activist as a poet and the head of the Medu Art Ensemble. Upon her return to South Africa, she represented the ANC at the negotiations to end apartheid and was a central figure in the relaunch of the ANC Women's League, serving as the league's secretary-general from 1991 to 1993.
Mbete was elected to the National Assembly in the first post-apartheid elections in 1994 and served in her seat until 2019, with the exception of a hiatus from 2009 to 2014. Her rise through the institution began in 1996, when she was elected as Deputy Speaker, and continued during the third democratic Parliament, when she succeeded Frene Ginwala as the second Speaker. In the last year of the third Parliament, she ascended to the Deputy Presidency during the reshuffle occasioned by the resignation of President Thabo Mbeki in September 2008; she held the office during the brief term of Mbeki's successor, President Kgalema Motlanthe.
Although she declined to return to Parliament after the 2009 general election, Mbete returned in May 2014 in her former office as Speaker of the National Assembly. She left her parliamentary seat again after the 2019 general election, though she remained active in the ANC Women's League.
A member of the ANC since 1976, Mbete served as the party's National Chairperson from December 2007 to December 2017 during Jacob Zuma's presidency. She was a member of the ANC National Executive Committee from 1994 to 2022.
Early life and education
Mbete was born on 24 September 1949 to a Hlubi family in Clermont, a township in Durban in the former Natal Province. She spent part of her childhood with her grandmother in the Northern Transvaal, where she attended pre-school. In 1958, her family moved to the Cape Province so that her father could take up work as a librarian at Fort Hare University. He later lost his job because of his affiliation with the South African Communist Party. Her mother was a nurse, and she was the second child and eldest daughter in the family.
After matriculating from the Inanda Seminary in 1968, Mbete enrolled in Eshowe Training College in Eshowe and later – after she was expelled from Eshowe – in the teaching college at Lovedale in Alice. She qualified as a teacher in 1973 and returned to Durban to teach at a high school in KwaMashu.
Anti-apartheid activism
While teaching in Natal, Mbete became involved in the Black Consciousness Movement, which at the time was ascendant in the struggle against apartheid. In early 1976, Mbete and her brother were detained for their political activism. Upon her release, she went into exile, leaving South Africa for Swaziland on 10 April 1976.
Exile: 1976–1990
In exile, Mbete joined the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC). She also taught at a high school in Mbabane, Swaziland until 1977, when she moved to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In Dar es Salaam, she pursued her ANC work with earnest, joining the party's Department of Information and Publicity – specifically, she worked on Radio Freedom – as well as its Women's Section, the department that substituted for the then-defunct ANC Women's League. Mbete was regional secretary for the Women's Section in Tanzania from 1978 to 1981.
From 1981 to 1983, she was an ANC public relations officer in Nairobi, Kenya, where her husband worked. Later she took posts in Gaborone, Botswana (1983 to 1986); Harare, Zimbabwe (1986 to 1987); and Lusaka, Zambia (1987 to 1990). In addition to her work with the Women's Section, she was involved in cultural activism and education, including as head of the Medu Art Ensemble; she was also a published poet, writing under her married name, Baleka Kgositsile.