Sheila Lapinsky

Sheila Barsel was born on 1 January 1944 in Johannesburg, then in the Transvaal Province of South Africa, into a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family. An aunt and uncle were members of the South African Communist Party, and according to South African History Online her parents did not allow her to become close to them. COSATU later said her lifelong activism began with values learned from family members active in the Communist Party and the Congress of Democrats. She matriculated from Parktown Girls' High in 1961 and graduated in sociology from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1966.

At Wits she became an activist in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), served as news editor of the student newspaper Wits Student, and rose to be general secretary of NUSAS. In that role she worked with Steve Biko and accused him of sexism, a confrontation recorded in Xolela Mangcu's biography of Biko.

As a result of the Schlebusch Commission she was served with a five-year banning order on 27 February 1973. It barred her from involvement with student organisations and from entering educational institutions, forcing her out of NUSAS. The ban expired in 1978.

During and after the ban she worked with women's organisations, including Rape Crisis. In 1983 she co-founded Lesbians in Love and Compromising Situations with her partner Julia Nicol. She was a member of the Gay Association of South Africa in the mid 1980s but found its mostly male membership isolating, and argued that its delegate to the International Lesbian and Gay Association should be black. In 1986 she co-founded Lesbians and Gays Against Oppression (LAGO) in Cape Town with Derrick Fine, Ivan Toms and Nicol; its successor, the Organisation for Lesbian and Gay Activists, applied to join the United Democratic Front, and she delivered the application. She was active in the End Conscription Campaign from 1987 to 1988, was detained in 1989 during a Jews for Justice protest in Cape Town, and in 1990 gave a keynote address at the ILGA annual conference.

She served on the executive of the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality until 1997 and joined the African National Congress, helping to build the ANC Cissy Gool branch in Observatory. She was a member of the SACP Central Committee and Politburo for many years, including the 2017 to 2022 term. In public health she helped formulate ANC health policies, served as health adviser to the Western Cape provincial government, and was part of the ministerial task team that formulated National Health Insurance. Her final roles were as a researcher in the parliamentary office of the National Health, Education and Allied Workers' Union and as an adviser to the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Lechesa Tsenoli.

She was married to a man earlier in life and came out as a lesbian during the 1970s. Her long-time partner was the activist and archivist Julia Nicol, with whom she co-founded lesbian and gay organisations in the 1980s; the two were the only lesbian members of the OLGA executive. Nicol died on 3 April 2019. She lived in retirement in Observatory, Cape Town.

Her death, at the age of 82, was announced by the Congress of South African Trade Unions on Sunday, 1 November 2026. The exact date, place and cause of death were not made public in the announcement. COSATU conveyed condolences to her family, friends and the activist community and described her as a humble, tireless, dedicated and principled activist. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Lapinsky belonged to a small group of activists who insisted that the struggle against apartheid and the struggle for lesbian and gay rights were one fight. The organisations she helped found in the 1980s tied sexual freedom to the wider liberation movement, and through her international speaking and correspondence she helped LGBTQ+ campaigners abroad understand the connections between racial and sexual justice in South Africa. In later life she carried the same commitment into public health policy. COSATU described her as one of the country's gallant yet unsung heroes.