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Zarina Maharaj is the award-winning author of a memoir ‘Dancing to a Different Rhythm’, which is a woman’s perspective of what life was like in the ANC–in –exile, and in the years following South Africa’s new political dispensation.
An M.Sc in Mathematics, she worked in the UK-based international team - that had patented the fax machine - on a new prototype. Following that she taught maths at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique, then went on to develop information technology applications in Zambia for the UN's Centre for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, for the British government's’s Overseas Development Administration (ODA).
At night she worked in the communications team of the secret mission ‘Operation Vula’ tasked by then ANC President Oliver Tambo to ‘Open the Road’ for exiled ANC leaders to return clandestinely to South Africa. This communications team developed and operated the computer-based message system that linked the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) fighting apartheid within South Africa to the leadership of the ANC outside, and trained underground freedom activists in its use.
With messages reaching him by subterfuge in his quarters at Victor Verster Prison during his imprisonment there, Nelson Mandela has written of this communications system that it ‘extended the boundaries of the struggle, and in doing that transformed the nature of the struggle itself.’
In post-democratic South Africa Zarina wrote newspaper columns and journal articles on issues of gender and development, and consulted to business on women’s economic empowerment, having obtained an M.A in Gender and Development from the UK's University of Sussex.
Now into film, she recently made the historical docudrama ‘Flat 13’ for ETV, a popular South African TV channel.
In 2011 she was admitted to the coveted Professional Screenwriting Program at the School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT) of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
She is a mother of two and a trustee of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.
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