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AnnMarie Wolpe (b. December 1, 1930, Johannesburg, South Africa – d. February 14, 2018, née Kantor) was a South African anti-apartheid activist, sociologist and feminist. Her husband Harold Wolpe was also a South African anti-apartheid activist who was imprisoned along with Nelson Mandela.
She fled South Africa after being arrested and interrogated. She wrote of her ordeal, and she was on the initial editorial board for Feminist Review when it was founded in 1979.
AnnMarie Kantor was born on December 1, 1930, in Johannesburg, daughter of Abraham and Pauline (née Braude) Kantor, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. Her brother was James Kantor, who was arrested but acquitted in the Rivonia Trial.
She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, and there met Harold Wolpe (1926-1996). They married in November 1955, and had three children.
Wolpe worked for the Transvaal clothing industry medical aid society, and later ran a bursary fund for African students.
Harold Wolpe was arrested in July 1963 along with Nelson Mandela and other ANC activists. During his time in prison, AnnMarie smuggled files and other tools into the prison hidden in loaves of bread and a roast chicken and communicated by notes hidden in the collars of the shirts she was allowed to take home to launder. Wolpe escaped from prison on August 11, 1963, along with three other activists, by bribing a jailer. After his escape, AnnMarie was arrested and brutally interrogated overnight. Fearing further arrest, she flew to England, leaving her three children (ages six, five and under six months, the baby recovering from serious pneumonia) with family friends. The children joined her within weeks, and her husband arrived in England in October via Swaziland. She later wrote a book, The Long Way Home, describing this part of her life.
Wolpe and her husband both built up academic careers in England. She worked initially in the University of Bradford's Yugoslav studies unit. She then moved to the future Middlesex University and established its Women's Studies program, earning a Ph.D. there.
Wolpe was on the initial editorial board for the Feminist Review and co-edited a work Feminism and Materialism with Annette Kuhn.
In 1991, the Wolpes returned to South Africa. She worked at the University of the Western Cape, initially in its Centre for Adult and Continuing Education and then in the Education Policy Unit until she retired in 1998. She then led a Gender Equity Task Team for the Ministry of Education and set up the Gender Equity Directorate in the Department of Education.
Wolpe died in her sleep on February 14, 2018. She was survived by three children and six grandchildren.
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AnnMarie Wolpe obituary
My friend AnnMarie Wolpe, who has died aged 87, was an anti-apartheid activist and feminist. Throughout her life, she displayed enormous resilience, sustained by an ironic sense of humour and wonderful elan.
In 1963, her husband, Harold Wolpe, a civil rights lawyer and member of the ANC and the South African Communist party, was arrested and imprisoned in Johannesburg under the 90-day detention act. He was listed as a co-conspirator of those who would become the defendants in the Rivonia trial, among them Nelson Mandela.
AnnMarie smuggled tungsten files and metal cutters into the prison inside loaves of bread and a chicken carcass. She helped bribe a guard, as well as passing messages to and from other prisoners and their families. With another detainee, Arthur Goldreich, Harold made his escape; they spent 18 hours in the boot of a car as they were driven out of South Africa across the border into Swaziland. Harold fled into exile in the UK.
AnnMarie was arrested but her lawyer, Joel Joffe, negotiated with the police to allow her to leave South Africa. She was forced to leave behind her three children, including a baby recovering from pneumonia, though they were subsequently able to join their parents in the UK.
The Wolpes forged successful academic careers, Harold as a sociologist at Essex University, and AnnMarie researching educational policy and publishing three books on the subject. She set up the women’s studies programme at Middlesex University and in 1980 was a founder member of the journal Feminist Review.
Daughter of Polly and Abraham Kantor, AnnMarie grew up in Johannesburg, where her father was a successful entrepreneur, and met Harold while they were both students at Witwatersrand University. Members of his political circle did not approve of the marriage, perceiving AnnMarie as a bourgeois princess who was incapable of understanding their radicalism, but her actions after his arrest earned their respect.
In later years, she was an exotic figure in feminist circles, a slightly camp grande dame, vivacious and beautiful, although sometimes at odds with the often puritanical attitudes of some feminists towards self presentation. She was devoted to her husband and children at a time when women were questioning traditional attitudes towards family life, but she was fully aware, through her own experience, of the contradictions that confronted women and the compromises they could feel forced to make.
With the ending of apartheid the Wolpes returned to South Africa, to Cape Town. AnnMarie felt quite ambivalent about this but, once there, she and Harold played an educational role in the ANC.
Harold died in 1996. AnnMarie is survived by their son, Nicholas, two daughters, Peta and Tessa, and six grandchildren, Jonathan and Alicia, Jade, James, Liam and Olivier.
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