Govender was born in
Durban in present-day KwaZulu-Natal (then
Natal province) and grew up in Durban Central. When she was eleven years old, her family was forcibly resettled to
Chatsworth, a
township designated for
Indians under the
apartheid-era
Group Areas Act. She matriculated at Chatsworth Secondary School and enrolled in a medical degree at the
University of Durban-Westville. In her second year at the university, she transferred to a humanities degree and also became politically active through the
student representative council, the
Natal Indian Congress, and the Chatsworth Housing Action Committee. She later joined the
United Democratic Front. She qualified as a teacher and began work at a school in Chatsworth in 1984. She remained active in the anti-apartheid movement and was
detained without trial for four months during the 1986
state of emergency. After her release she moved to a different secondary school in
Umkomaas, where she worked until she resigned in 1988. She subsequently worked for three years as an education officer at the
Garment Workers' Union, which during her tenure affiliated to the ANC-aligned
Congress of South African Trade Unions, and then as a coordinator at the Community Research Unit, before she returned to teaching. She joined the ANC and the allied
South African Communist Party while the organisations were still banned by the apartheid government, and she was an underground operative for the ANC's
Operation Vula. She attended the
Convention for a Democratic South Africa as a delegate. == Career in government ==