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.

A mathematician in the UK-based international team that researched, patented, then in the seventies refined the concept of the fax machine - having obtained a Master of Science (M.Sc) degree in Mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK - she went on to teach mathematics at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo in newly post-independent Mozambique, thereafter developing information technology applications in Zambia for both the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, for the UK’s Overseas Development Administration (ODA). Those were her day jobs.

At night she worked in the communications team of the highly 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 both developed and ran the computer-based message encryption 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. Reaching by subterfuge right into 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 a Master of Arts (M.A) degree in Gender and Development in the early nineties from the University of Sussex. UK.

Now a film-maker, Zarina wrote, produced, directed and narrated her first film ‘Flat 13’ for ETV, an historical documentary which was among those selected for screening at the 2009 Durban International Film Festival (DIFF), as well as on national TV, and overseas. She has succeeded in being selected for the prestigious Talent Campus Durban of 2010 themed ‘Unleashing African Film Talent’, produced by the Durban International Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival working in co-operation.. 

Zarina is a trustee of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.