Helen Zille

Helen Zille was born in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, the eldest child of parents who separately left Germany in the 1930s to avoid Nazi persecution due to the fact that her maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were Jewish.

Zille was believed to be the grandniece of the Berlin painter Heinrich Zille.

Otta Helene Maree (née Zille ; born 9 March 1951), known as Helen Zille, is a South African politician.

Around 1969, she joined the Young Progressives, the youth movement of the liberal and anti-apartheid Progressive Party.

Zille is a former journalist and anti-apartheid activist and was one of the journalists who exposed the cover-up around the death of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko while working for the Rand Daily Mail in the late 1970s.

Zille began her career as a political correspondent for the Rand Daily Mail newspaper in 1974.

During September 1977, the South African Minister of Justice and the Police J.T. Kruger announced that anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko had died in prison as the result of an extended hunger strike.

Zille and her editor Allister Sparks were convinced Kruger's story was a cover-up, and Zille obtained concrete proof of this after tracking down and interviewing doctors involved in the case.

Consequent to the publication of the story, headlined "No sign of hunger strike—Biko doctors", Minister Kruger immediately threatened to ban the newspaper, and Zille received death threats.

Zille and Sparks were represented at the subsequent quasi-judicial Press Council by defence lawyer Sydney Kentridge.

The two were found to be guilty of "tendentious reporting", and the paper was forced to issue a correction.

Kentridge later helped confirm the accuracy of Zille's account when he represented the Biko family at the inquest into his death.

That inquest found Biko's death had been the result of a serious head injury but failed to find any individual responsible.

Zille resigned from the Rand Daily Mail along with editor Allister Sparks, after the paper's owner, Anglo American, demanded that Sparks quiet the paper's equal rights rhetoric.

She also worked with the Black Sash and other pro-democracy groups during the 1980s.

Zille was heavily involved in the Black Sash movement during the 1980s.

She served on the regional and national executives of the organisation, and was also vice-chair of the End Conscription Campaign in the Western Cape.

During this time, she was arrested for being in a "group area" without a permit and received a suspended prison sentence.

Zille and her husband later offered their home as a safe house for political activists during the 1986 State of Emergency, and she was temporarily forced into hiding with their two-year-old son.

Zille was also actively involved in the South Africa Beyond Apartheid Project and the Cape Town Peace Committee.

Zille formed a public policy consultancy in 1989, and in 1993 she was offered the position of Director of Development and Public Affairs at the University of Cape Town.

She later gathered evidence for the Goldstone Commission which investigated attempts to destabilise the Western Cape before the elections in 1994.

During this time Zille also chaired the governing body of Grove Primary School, and in 1996 led a successful challenge against government policy limiting governing bodies' powers to appoint staff.

Zille was then invited by the Democratic Party (now the Democratic Alliance) to write a draft policy for Education in the Western Cape.

In the political arena, Zille has served in all three tiers of government, as the Western Cape's education MEC (1999–2001), as a Member of Parliament (2004–2006), as Mayor of Cape Town (2006–2009), and as Premier of the Western Cape (2009–2019).

She was also chosen as Newsmaker of the Year 2006 by the National Press Club in July 2007.

Zille speaks English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, and German.

She served as Federal Leader of the Democratic Alliance from 2007 to 2015 and as Mayor of Cape Town from 2006 to 2009.

Zille was selected as World Mayor of the Year in 2008.

From 2009 until 2019, she was the Premier of the Western Cape province for two five-year terms, and a member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament.

She gave corresponding hints by herself in the past but withdrew them in her autobiography published in 2016.

The Berlin genealogist Martina Rhode had documented before that there was a mix-up in the handwritten notes of her uncle Heinrich between people with the same name but different birthplaces and dates of birth.

Her mother was a volunteer with the Black Sash Advice Office.

While her family lived in Rivonia, she was educated at Johannesburg's St Mary's School, Waverley, one of the city's private education schools.

She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree.

She has served as the Chairperson of the Federal Council of the Democratic Alliance since 20 October 2019.

Following her departure from the premiership in May 2019, she joined the South African Institute of Race Relations as a senior policy fellow in July 2019, though she suspended her fellowship in October 2019.

She started her own podcast, Tea with Helen, in August 2019.

Zille declared her candidacy for Federal Council Chairperson of the DA in October 2019.

She won the election.