Sunday, 1 November 2026:- The South African Communist Party (SACP) dips its red flag in mourning the death of our beloved Comrade Sheila Barsel, known to generations of activists as Sheila Lapinsky, 82, who died on the night of 31 October. As the SACP, we convey our heartfelt condolences to her family, friends and comrades, as well as the entire liberation movement, including the many communities of struggle whose lives and organisations she helped build and sustain.
Her loved ones have shared that she took her last breath peacefully, surrounded by people from different spheres of her life. We receive that news with profound sadness but also with gratitude for a life of courage, conviction and service.
Comrade Sheila was a long-serving member of the SACP Central Committee and former member of the Politburo. With only three days before the 2026 local government elections, wherein the SACP will for the first time participate independently in its own name across the country, this is an important moment to celebrate her contribution to our struggle for liberation and social emancipation and to engage in principled reflections on taking the revolution forward.
A member of the SACP for more than four decades, Comrade Sheila sustained her communist commitment across decades of repression, resistance and democratic construction, fiercely rejecting and challenging white privilege for decades, confronting the apartheid regime’s ruthlessness.
She served on the SACP Party Central Committee for decades, re-elected, and brought to our movement an independent mind, a formidable political determination and an insistence that liberation and social emancipation must reach into every sphere of human life. The SACP leadership records bear witness to her contribution.
A life formed in struggle
Comrade Sheila belonged to a generation that confronted the apartheid state at great personal cost. By the time she matriculated from Parktown Girls’ High in 1961 and enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, her aunt and uncle were already members of the Communist Party from the 1940s, both of whom she was immensely proud of and inspired her to join the struggle against apartheid.
Her organised political life developed through student activism at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1960s. She became involved in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), student journalism and community work, and taught at an African night school before the apartheid authorities closed it. She subsequently served as NUSAS General Secretary and helped to organise student opposition to apartheid and supporting access to education.
In 1973, the apartheid regime banned Shiela alongside other NUSAS leaders. The restrictions forced her out of student work and severely constrained her political and social life until 1978. These were years of deliberate isolation through which the regime sought to break the relationships and organisational capacities of its opponents. Sheila endured them and continued her political journey.
She was a feisty feminist and a member of the United Women’s Organisation. Comrade Shiela’s involvement in women’s organising, including Rape Crisis, deepened her challenge to patriarchal power. She understood that the struggle against apartheid could not leave women’s subordination untouched. Nor could comrades invoke the urgency of national liberation to postpone confronting sexism, including within our movement itself.
The apartheid regime’s banning orders did not prevent Comrade Sheila from confronting the system in its various oppressive forms. In the years that followed, she continued to organise, including through the End Conscription Campaign from 1987 to 1988, which challenged the conscription of white young men into the apartheid military.
An open lesbian who helped change the liberation movement
As an out and open lesbian activist, Sheila brought that same courage into the struggle against homophobia. She challenged anti-queer exclusion and prejudice in society and within the liberation movement itself. At a time when speaking openly could mean rejection even among some comrades, it took courage to ask the movement to examine its own practices. Sheila also helped build lesbian and gay organising that recognised the necessity of confronting apartheid. We honour her for doing so.
During the 1980s, alongside Julia Nicol (her late partner), the late Ivan Toms and other activists, she helped build the Lesbians and Gays Against Oppression (LAGO) and its successor, the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Activists (OLGA). These organisations connected sexual freedom with the struggle for a non-racial, democratic South Africa and, on her part, the struggle for a socialist society, a society free from all forms of oppression.
As part of OLGA, Sheila challenged the United Democratic Front (UDF) to recognise organised lesbian and gay people as participants in the liberation struggle and to accept OLGA as an affiliate. That struggle achieved an important breakthrough when the UDF Western Cape General Council accepted OLGA’s affiliation on 30 March 1990. The significance extended beyond admission to meetings. It created opportunities to challenge homophobia across the mass democratic movement and society at large, undertake political education and bring lesbian and gay voices directly into collective deliberation. Sheila helped insist that our movement examine whether its practices matched its promise of freedom.
For communists, this part of Comrade Sheila’s life carries a lasting lesson. Workers bring the whole of their lives into the struggle. A worker who can be dismissed because of whom she loves is more vulnerable to the power of an employer. A comrade who fears humiliation in the broader movement is denied an equal voice in shaping our programme. Building working-class unity demands that we confront such injustices wherever they arise, including in the ranks of our movement.
Comrade Sheila was also an unapologetic internationalist, consistently raising her voice against imperialism. Born to a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family, she never shied away from throwing her full weight behind the struggle of the people of Palestine against the occupation of their land by the Zionist Israeli regime.
On 15 February 2020 in Cape Town, the SACP conferred the Stalwart Award on Comrade Sheila in recognition of her contribution to fighting against apartheid and her efforts to build a democratic society and a better and just world for all of humanity, regardless of nationality, race, sex, gender, or ethnic origin. Among the recipients of the award were comrades Leon Levy and Blanche La Guma.
A builder of constitutional equality
Comrade Sheila played an important role in the founding of the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and in its successful campaign to secure protection against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in the final Constitution. She served on its executive during its formative years.
That achievement built on earlier organising and lobbying, including OLGA’s engagement with the ANC’s constitutional processes. It was a collective victory won through sustained political work, persuasion and mobilisation. Sheila was among the activists who helped make equality a constitutional commitment rather than an aspiration that could indefinitely be deferred.
Her contribution reminds us that constitutional gains have a history of struggle behind them. Their defence and realisation require continuing organisation against violence, discrimination, poverty and exclusion.
Sheila also contributed to public-health policy, worked with the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union as a health researcher and served on the Ministerial Advisory Committee on National Health Insurance, where her responsibilities included the development of health workers.
We recall, too, her engagement with comrades on National Health Insurance. Sheila understood what is at stake for working-class families when access to care depends on what a household can afford.
In her memory, the SACP reaffirms its commitment to National Health Insurance and to a universal public health system in which everyone can receive quality care according to need.
Comrade Shiela served South Africa on many fronts of development and transformation. These included her role as the political advisor to the former Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Lechesa Tsenoli, and her role as a member of the Council of the University of Cape Town for a long period from 2010.
Her participation in Amandla! magazine reflected her continuing engagement with socialist debate and the search for emancipatory alternatives.
A communist till the end
We remember Comrade Sheila’s feistiness with affection. Her willingness to challenge comrades was part of what she gave to the movement. She would not allow women or lesbians to disappear behind general declarations of equality. Her political presence required us to think harder about whom our words included and whose experiences our organisations overlooked.
Today, behind the public history, we also mourn a beloved partner, friend and elder. Our thoughts are especially with those who shared her daily life, cared for her and accompanied her in her final days. Their loss is intimate and immeasurable.
Her loved ones have conveyed her wish for a private cremation and a celebration of her life.
The SACP respects those wishes and will engage with them alongside fellow organisations on an appropriate collective tribute.
We honour Comrade Sheila Barsel by continuing the work to which she gave her life: building working-class power, confronting racism and patriarchy, defending queer freedom and advancing a democratic, socialist society grounded in human dignity.
Hamba kahle, Comrade Sheila Barsel. Your courage helped widen the meaning and practice of liberation and the struggle for social emancipation.
We carry that responsibility forward.
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY
FOUNDED IN 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA.
Media, Communications & Information Department | MCID
Mhlekwa Nxumalo, Acting National Spokesperson
+27(0) 84 219 3801
____________________________________________________
FOR INTERVIEW ARRANGEMENTS, MEDIA LIAISON & CIRCULATION SERVICES
Pius Vilakati
Communications & Acting Media Liaison Officer
Mobile: +27 81353 3383
____________________________________
OFFICE & OTHER CONTACT DETAILS
Office: +2711 339 3621/2
Website: www.sacp.org.za
Facebook Page: South African Communist Party
Twitter: SACP1921
_____________________________________
WELCOME TO THE SACP DONATION PAGE: https://donate.sacp.org.za/. PLEASE MAKE A CLEAN DONATION.
