Background
Ben Martins was born in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg and attended school at Street Joseph’s School in Aliwal North, Bechet College in Durban and Coronationville High School in Johannesburg.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Ben Martins
Edit ProfileEducation
Ben Martins was born in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg and attended school at Street Joseph’s School in Aliwal North, Bechet College in Durban and Coronationville High School in Johannesburg. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Africa, a Bachelor of Law (Bachelor of Laws) degree from the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal) and a Master of Law Degree (Master of Laws) as well as a Post Graduate Diploma in Management Practice from the University of Cape Town.
Career
Early Activist With an artistic background after studying at Bill Ainslie"s studio and at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) with the likes of Johnny Rieberio, Fikile Magadlela and Thamsanqa Mnyele, and posters for the movement. He later produced the famous poster distributed at Biko"s funeral. He was made the chief coordinator of the visual art committee in South Africa for assisting artists to attend the Culture and Resistance Conference and Festival in Gaborone.
From 1977 up to the time of his arrest he worked and ran art workshops while setting up one of the earliest silk screen and poster making collectives at the Old Mill building in Pietermaritzburg.
During the 1980s, he produced T-shirts and posters for the United Democratic Front, while also contributing poetry, essays, and graphics to Staffrider magazine, an important and explicitly non-racial literary production in the 70s and 80s written for the general public about daily life in South Africa. He was later arrested under the Terrorism Acting and from 1983 to 1991, was jailed at Robben Island and in Johannesburg.
Foreign a period of seven months prior to trial, he was placed in solitary confinement and tortured by the security police. In addition, he released his second work in 1992, Prison Poems.
While serving in Parliament, he was appointed by President Jacob Zuma to serve as Deputy Minister of Public Enterprises, which he did from November 1, 2010 to June 12, 2012.
During a subsequent cabinet reshuffle, he was promoted to become Minister of Transport, serving from June 2012 to July 2013. He was then appointed to become Minister of Energy on July 10, 2013. He continues to be a patron of the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW).
He is still a practicing artist, with his artwork forming part of the permanent Art collection of the Killie Campbell Collection of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the Pretoria and Johannesburg Art Galleries, as well as that of numerous private collections.
Politics
In the late 1970s, he traveled to Botswana and Lesotho to meet with activists-in-exile such as Mnyele and Wally Serote and in 1979, became a member of the African National Congress (later joining Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed branch of the African National Congress). After his release, he took a job working for the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.
Membership
He has served in Parliament since 1994 and has been a Central Committee Member of the South African Communist Party. Martins was a member of the Black Consciousness Movement beginning in the 1970s. Ben Martins became a Member of Parliament after the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994.
He was unsuccessful in a bid to become a member of the African National Congress National Executive Committee in 2012.
In addition to his governmental duties, he is a Member of Council of the Robben Island Museum and an Executive Committee Member of the Caversham Centre for writers and artists.
-
Born
-
Nationality
South Africa -
Political Party
African National Congress