Sekai Holland
| Sekai Holland | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 1942 |
| Occupation | Politician |
| Spouse(s) | Jim Holland |
Sekai Holland is the Zimbabwean Co-Minister of State for National Healing, Reconciliation and Integration in the Cabinet of President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. Sekai has been involved in a number of human rights issues, from those of the Australian Aborigines, ending the apartheid system in South Africa, the rights of women and democracy in Zimbabwe. Her father, teacher-writer-magazine editor, Masotsha Mike Hove (1914-2012), was elected in 1953 as a special representative to the First Central African Federation parliament. He had the distinction of being the first African allowed to be designated an "employee" under the regulations pertaining to the Rhodesian Guild of Journalists in Southern Rhodesia.
Sekai Holland travelled to Australia as a student, married Australian Jim Holland in 1965, and completed a Bachelor of Arts (Communication) at the University of Technology Sydney in 1979. In 1980 Sekai and her husband Jim Holland returned to Zimbabwe to be part of the post-independence nation-building project.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Sekai completed a Master of Science (Agricultural Journalism) at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and worked in a number of volunteer and paid roles including:
Sekai was a founder of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Australia in the late 1960s, she helped to establish the Murrawina Child Care Centre in Redfern, and she worked actively with the Aboriginal community on the land rights campaign.
Sekai helped resuscitate the important but moribund Association of Women’s Clubs (AWC – 60 000 members), a grassroots rural women’s development organisation established in 1938 by an 18-year-old African woman. With Sekai as its National Chairperson AWC became active in speaking for the rights of women against the increasingly repressive Mugabe government. The leadership was gazetted and banned from AWC by the government. Sekai made a Supreme Court challenge against the government’s action and won, making history with the human rights case ‘Sekai Holland and Others vs the Ministry of Labour, Social Welfare and Public Service’.
In 1998–99 Sekai became convinced that development through NGO activity was impossible under the Mugabe government, and with Morgan Tsvangirai, she started the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as a real alternative to one-party rule.’ ‘Founded in 1999, the MDC was the only substantive challenge to President Mugabe, the once admired revolutionary hero-cum-strongman, who had dominated Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. With elections scheduled for the following year, a brutal campaign of terror was underway to intimidate the increasingly popular MDC from participating in the political process.’
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