Cecilia Makiwane
Photo: South African History Online via National Archives, Pretoria
Country: South Africa
Location: Macfarlane Mission, Victoria District, Alice, Eastern Cape (then Cape Colony), South Africa/Thaba ‘Nchu, Free State (then Orange Free State), South Africa
About
Cecilia Makiwane (1880-1919) was the first African woman to become a professional nurse in South Africa and an early women's rights activist.
Biography by Jaedyn Griddine
A statue of Cecilia Makiwane, the first African woman to become a professional nurse in South Africa, outside the hospital that bears her name. Source: WORDPIX.
Wherever there is a history of colonialism, there is a legacy of violence against Black people and a system to uphold that legacy. South Africa is no exception. In highlighting Cecilia Makiwane, we are also highlighting the centuries-long opposition to such a legacy that has been occurring across all former and current colonies, as Makiwane herself entered the medical field to ensure the health of her people and strike a blow to the pervasive systems of violence in South Africa.
Makiwane was born in 1880 to mother Maggie Majiza and father Reverend Elijah Makiwane; sadly, her mother passed during Cecilia’s infancy, leaving her and her siblings to be raised solely by their father. The Makiwane family held deep ties to education: both Maggie and Elijah taught at all-girls’ schools, and Elijah raised the children to prioritize education as a means of social mobility, homeschooling them during their early years. Cecilia then went on to pursue a teacher’s certificate at Lovedale Girls School, where her father taught. Though she would’ve likely excelled as a teacher, Cecilia was struck by the urge to pursue another field-nursing. She began working at Victoria Hospital as a ward nurse. A once whites-only institution, Lovedale College, with which Victoria Hospital was affiliated, accepted two Black students into their newly-debuted three-year nursing program in 1903, one of which being Cecilia. She studied diligently and subsequently completed a year of training at Butterworth Hospital in preparation for the Colonial Medical Council exam, which proved to be an attainable feat. Upon passing this exam, she became the first licensed Black nurse-not just in South Africa, but in the entire African continent-in 1907. In doing so, Cecilia continued the Makiwane legacy of breaking through racial barriers; her father was the second Black minister ordained in the Presbyterian Church, and her sister Daisy was the first African woman to earn a mathematics degree.
Cecilia Makiwane. Charcoal on Paper by Dr. Amitabh Mitra. November 7, 2016. Wikimedia Commons.
Cecilia was an activist in two ways; for one, she was one of 800 women to voice their grievances about pass laws at City Hall, laws which regulated Black people’s ability to exist in public spaces by forcing them to carry residential passes; this act was part of a greater anti-pass campaign, likely the first of its kind to be led by women and certainly one of the most fortified women’s movements in African history. She was also an activist in her work, as her mere existence and excellence as a Black nurse proved how a foundation of hate, such as the one on which South Africa’s colonial legacy stood, will always falter under the heels of those it was built to oppress. Makiwane’s name remains ever-strong, as strong as the statue of her erected at Lovedale Hospital in 1977, as the Nurse’s Recognition Award initiated by the South African government in her honor in 2002, as the hospital named in her honor in 2017, as the millions of African women nurses who have followed in her footsteps.
Sources
Cecilia Makiwane—Pioneer African Nurse by David P. Steensma, Marc A. Shampo, and Robert A. Kyle
Cecilia Makiwane: In Memory of Africa’s First Nurse by Natalie Sifuma
