Ros Ainslie
| Ros de Lanerolle | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 22, 1932 Cape Town, South Africa |
| Died | September 23, 1993 (aged 61) London, UK |
| Occupation | Activist, feminist publisher |
Ros de Lanerolle (22 January 1932 – 23 September 1993), also known as Rosalynde Ainslie, was a South African activist, journalist and publisher. Having settled in Britain in the 1950s, she campaigned actively against apartheid, and later became a pioneering figure in women's publishing in the UK, called by Florence Howe "the doyenne of feminist publishers".
Jennifer Rosalynde Ainslie was born in 1932 in Cape Town, where she went to school and attended the University of Cape Town, before moving to London, England, in 1954 as a graduate student of English literature. A radical socialist, she became increasingly involved with the politics of Southern Africa, and on a 1958 visit to Northern Rhodesia, hoping to meet South African trade unionists working there, she was taken into custody, declared undesirable, and deported.
She became London representative of the anti-apartheid quarterly journal Africa South, edited by Ronald Segal, and interacted closely with other South African exiles, including Ruth First, with whom she formed a close 20-year friendship. De Lanerolle was a member of the Boycott Movement (others included Peter Koinange, Claudia Jones and Steve Naidoo) founded in London on 26 June 1959, campaigning around the call by Albert Luthuli to boycott South African exports. In 1960 she was a prime initiator, together with Vella Pillay and Abdul Minty, of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) in Britain, and was its first secretary. She wrote two important pamphlets, published by AAM: Unholy Alliance (1961), analysing the support that the British military and business community and government gave to the white-minority Verwoerd regime (the pamphlet was launched at a press conference in London in 1962 by Irish writer and diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien, who contributed the Introduction), and The Collaborators (with Dorothy Robinson, 1964), revealing the intricacies of the financial politics of apartheid.
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