Tintswalo Godwin George Mashamba was born on 1944 and is a South African politician and intellectual who represented the African National Congress in the South African Senate and Limpopo Provincial Legislature until 2014.
13 Facts About George Mashamba
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George Mashamba was imprisoned from 1977 to 1987 for his ANC activities and spent five years on Robben Island.
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George Mashamba was elected to the first democratically elected Senate in 1994.
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George Mashamba served as Provincial Chairperson of the ANC in Limpopo from 1996 to 1998 and is a former member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.
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George Mashamba was recruited into the African National Congress in 1974, at which time the organisation was banned by the apartheid government and operated underground.
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George Mashamba and his wife were recruited during a meeting in Swaziland with the leaders of the ANC's Swaziland unit, including Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki, who persuaded the Mashambas to set up an underground ANC cell at the University of the North, where Mashamba was a philosophy lecturer and Master's student.
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George Mashamba's wife served five years in a women's prison, and their three young children, all under the age of six, were raised by family during that time.
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George Mashamba was imprisoned alongside Nelson Mandela and a large contingent of other ANC members, who maintained a party organisation inside the prison; George Mashamba was apparently expelled from the party for a year during his prison sentence because he openly disagreed with the leadership on some issue.
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In South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, George Mashamba was elected to represent the ANC in the Senate, the upper house of the new Constitutional Assembly.
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George Mashamba served, from 1996 to 1998, as Provincial Chairperson of the ANC's branch in the newly constituted Limpopo Province.
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In later years, and alongside his wife, George Mashamba represented the ANC in the Limpopo Provincial Legislature.
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George Mashamba was elected to his final term in the legislature in the 2009 general election, ranked seventh on the ANC's provincial party list, and he chaired the legislature's committee on agriculture during the legislative term that followed.
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George Mashamba did not seek re-election in the 2014 general election.