Zanele Dlamini Mbeki

Zanele Dlamini Mbeki is the former first lady of South Africa and the wife of former South African President, Thabo Mbeki.

Zanele Dlamini was born in Alexandra in 1938 where her father was a Methodist priest and her mother a dressmaker. She has five sisters.

Mbeki was a boarder at the Catholic Inkamana Academy in KwaZulu-Natal before studying to be a social worker at the University of the Witwatersrand.

After working for three years for Anglo American plc as a case worker in Zambia, Mbeki moved to London and completed a diploma in social policy and administration at the London School of Economics in 1968. She later won a scholarship to do her PhD on the position of African women under apartheid at Brandeis University in the United States, although she left the United States to marry Thabo Mbeki before completing it.

While in London, Mbeki worked as a psychiatric social worker at Guy’s Hospital, and at the Marlborough Day Hospital.

After her marriage, Mbeki worked for the International University Education Fund in Lusaka, Zambia. She resigned in 1980, shortly before it was closed down after the exposure of her boss, Craig Williamson, as a South African spy. She was also elected to the ANC's Women's League and edited the Voice of Women. Mbeki lectured at the University of Zambia for two years and then worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Nairobi.

When they returned to South Africa in 1990, Mbeki founded the Women’s Development Bank, which offers microfinance to poor South African women. While her husband was campaigning, she rarely appeared with him and refused to grant interviews. When her husband became President in 1999, she became First Lady of South Africa. She is a feminist and an advocate for women's rights. In July 2003, she convened the South African Women in Dialogue, designed to enable women to participate fully in the country's development.

Mbeki met Thabo Mbeki while studying at the University of London and they were married in a registry office in London on 23 November 1974, followed by a religious ceremony at the home of her older sister Edith, Farnham Castle in Surrey. He had to receive permission from the ANC to marry and reportedly told Adelaide Tambo "if Papa [Oliver Tambo] doesn't allow me to marry Zanele, I'll never, ever marry again. And I'll never ask again. I love only one person and there is only one person I want to make my life with, and that is Zanele." The couple have no children and have often lived apart.