OBITUARY: Sylvia Benjamin: NUM trailblazer

SYLVIA Benjamin, who has died at the age of 73, was a beauty queen who rose to the top of the most macho trade union in South Africa and helped to bring the apartheid-era mining industry to its knees.

She was the first and only woman to serve on the executive committee of the National Union of Mineworkers. In 1985, a rowdy, almost all-male congress of the NUM elected her as its treasurer.

Although she was voted out two years later, she was part of the team led by Cyril Ramaphosa that confronted the then all-powerful Chamber of Mines in 1987 and led more than 300000 miners on a three-week strike that brought the industry to its knees.

Benjamin was born in Bloemfontein on November 15 1939. Her father was a miner. However, when she was two the family moved to Klerksdorp, where he became a successful businessman with a restaurant, a grocery store and a shop selling school uniforms and books.

After completing her education at a Roman Catholic convent school in Venterspost and at Moroka High in Thaba Nchu, where she matriculated, she helped to run the shops and learnt the auditing skills that were later to put the NUM on a sound financial footing.

In the early 1960s she won several beauty contests, including Miss Klerksdorp, Miss World Newspaper and Miss All Blacks Football Club. She qualified as a beauty consultant and started a back-room beauty clinic and hair salon where she braided hair for R10. Her daughters took turns holding candles for her so that she could work at night.

In 1978, she joined Stilfontein gold mine in Klerksdorp as an aptitude clerk. She was so angered by the way mineworkers were treated that she became a shaft steward and was actively involved in recruiting for the NUM, which was launched in 1982.

By the time she joined the NUM, she had been an ANC member since the late '50s and an active trade unionist during the '70s.

She worked closely with Ramaphosa, who used to stay at her home overnight when he was doing union business in Klerksdorp.

She was detained several times by the security police for brief periods. On one occasion, while in prison in Klerksdorp, she went on a hunger strike.

She was a small woman who established a reputation for fearlessness. Both her colleagues and the Chamber of Mines representatives she faced across the table were impressed by how articulate she was in English.

She had a forthright and no-nonsense manner, without which she would not have survived, let alone progressed as she did, in such a raw male environment. For example, when South Africa's first black female mining entrepreneur, Bridgette Radebe, got involved in the industry, the president of the NUM, James Motlatsi, warned her that "these mineworkers will put you in the bag as soon as they can".

Holding her own as a young beauty queen in such an environment required a sharp tongue and nerves of steel, both of which Benjamin had in abundance. If any of her male colleagues got too friendly, she would quickly remind him: "I am not here for a love relationship; I am here for the struggle."

Benjamin did part-time work for Lawyers for Human Rights in the early 1990s and, from 1994 to 2005, was a member of the Matlosana (Klerksdorp) city council.

She never married and brought up three daughters alone, proud of the fact that she never went to court to force their father to pay maintenance. She taught her daughters to be self-reliant and take no nonsense from men. All three subsequently divorced their husbands.

She is survived by two daughters. Her daughter Elizabeth, an advocate, died in 2007.