Rudean Leinaeng

Rudean Leinaeng is a chemist, an educator and an anti-apartheid activist who has spent long stretches of her life in Africa. She began her 30-year teaching career at Bronx Community College in 1967, and on sabbatical leave in 1974 she and her two sons moved to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she taught chemistry and physics to high school students, and become active in the Pan-African movement. Returning to New York in 1976, she married Pule Leinaeng, a South African refugee from Bloemfontein and an African National Congress (ANC) activist. Together they worked in the anti-apartheid movement, and their Bronx home served as a home-away-from-home for young South African refugees and a meeting place for the ANC in exile.

In the1980s and 1990s, Leinaeng also became active with Women for Racial and Economic Equality (WREE), a national, multi-racial working class women’s organization. She worked on WREE’s boycott of companies that did business in South Africa, US voter registration and education drives, advocacy for 1990-91 US civil rights legislation, and the publication of WREE’s Women’s Services booklet.

In 1997 Leinaeng resigned her teaching position at Bronx Community College to follow her husband Lee to Bloemfontein, South Africa, where they lived together until Lee’s death in 2000. She returns there for several months each year. She is currently an advisor to the Bethel AME Church emergency food pantry in Harlem, where she served as assistant director for many years.