Rita Hinden

Rita Hinden (16 December 1909 – 18 November 1971), born Rebecca Gesundheit in Cape Town, Cape Colony, was a South African-born British journalist, socialist activist, and campaigner on colonial issues. She is best remembered for founding and serving as the first secretary of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, through which she played a significant role in shaping Labour Party colonial policy during and after the Second World War.

Hinden studied economics at the London School of Economics, where she later earned her doctorate in 1939. After a period in Palestine, she and her husband settled permanently in London in 1938. She joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society the following year, and soon after co-founded the Fabian Colonial Bureau alongside Arthur Creech Jones. Her early output at the bureau included Plan for Africa (1942) and the edited volume Fabian Colonial Essays (1945), both of which helped define Fabian and Labour approaches to colonial development. After stepping down from the bureau in 1950, she took on the editorship of Socialist Commentary, in which she championed revisionist social democracy and the intellectual legacy of the English Christian socialist R. H. Tawney. She was also a key intellectual at the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. She died at Whipps Cross Hospital, London, on 18 November 1971.