Ellen Kuzwayo, activist, author and women’s rights champion

JOHANNESBURG – South African author, women’s rights and anti-apartheid champion Ellen Kuzwayo has died.

She was 91. Kuzwayo was the first black writer to win South Africa’s premier CNA Literary Prize for her 1985 autobiography ‘Call Me Woman’, a book that made her a spokeswoman for the suffering and triumphs of black women under apartheid.”My motivation for writing the book was born out of the negative image about black women in South Africa, promoted by the general community of white people of this country, in particular the women …who employed African work as domestic workers,” Kuzwayo said.In 1996, she published a collection of short stories: ‘Sit Down and Listen: Stories from South Africa’.She also collaborated on films.The African National Congress, for whom Kuzwayo served five years in Parliament, remembered her as a “pillar of the democratic struggle and a source of inspiration for successive generations of freedom fighters”.Trained as a teacher and social worker, she moved to Soweto, where she became an active opponent of the brutal white-minority regime after police gunned down students in 1976 protests against the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in black schools.Arrested for her political activities, she spent five months in detention in 1977.Kuzwayo was elected to Parliament in South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994.She became an institution in Soweto, where her advice was sought by schools, church groups, welfare agencies and many others.- Nampa-AP * The New York Times described Kuzwayo as “the lone woman and the least flashy of the founders of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and a quiet moral force throughout the rise of the African National Congress from outlaw movement to governing party”.It noted that ‘Call Me Woman’ described her beatings by her first husband and her loss of their children to him when they separated, because by law and tradition she was a minor Further, “In her 1996 testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated apartheid-era crimes, she described her predawn arrest, hiding in the bathroom trying to bathe and dress as police horses trampled her yard, and instructing Bobo [her son], then a teenager, to keep a sharp eye out so that the police did not plant evidence as they searched.She later helped establish the Urban Foundation, which pressed the government to let blacks own their houses, and she was a longtime adviser of the Zamani Soweto Sisters Council, the umbrella body for women’s self-help groups; the first president of the Black Consumer Union; and the General Secretary of the YWCA.Kuzwayo was born June 29 1914, in the Orange Free State, into a family of ministers and teachers.At 22, she began attending local ANC conferences with her father.In the 1940s, she joined Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and others in forming the breakaway African National Congress Youth League, a more militant offshoot, and served as its secretary.She became a teacher in 1938, but quit the profession in 1952 when the Native Education laws were supplanted by the Bantu Education Act, and missionary schools were closed.”I did not have the strength nor the courage to teach the children of my community what appeared to be very poisonous to their minds,” she said later.”The National Party gave them an inferior education so those children were going to remain the slaves of white people.”She became a social worker, eventually becoming a revered figure in Soweto, known as Ma K, giving advice to women’s groups, churches and schools and earning a salary from the social work department of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.One of her most common laments was the lasting damage that apartheid and the violent fight against it had done to South Africa’s children.In her early days as a social worker, she said, “Sometimes after sunset I would be going through Orlando Station to go to my home, and it would be dark, and if I saw a group of young men standing there, I just ordered them to take me home.””They would be grousing that they should be doing something else rather than taking this old lady home, but they obeyed.Believe you me, today I cannot do that, because I don’t trust the very children who ought to protect me because of the handling of the government of South Africa of those days.They turned our children into animals.”Kuzwayo was the first black writer to win South Africa’s premier CNA Literary Prize for her 1985 autobiography ‘Call Me Woman’, a book that made her a spokeswoman for the suffering and triumphs of black women under apartheid.”My motivation for writing the book was born out of the negative image about black women in South Africa, promoted by the general community of white people of this country, in particular the women …who employed African work as domestic workers,” Kuzwayo said.In 1996, she published a collection of short stories: ‘Sit Down and Listen: Stories from South Africa’.She also collaborated on films.The African National Congress, for whom Kuzwayo served five years in Parliament, remembered her as a “pillar of the democratic struggle and a source of inspiration for successive generations of freedom fighters”.Trained as a teacher and social worker, she moved to Soweto, where she became an active opponent of the brutal white-minority regime after police gunned down students in 1976 protests against the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in black schools.Arrested for her political activities, she spent five months in detention in 1977.Kuzwayo was elected to Parliament in South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994.She became an institution in Soweto, where her advice was sought by schools, church groups, welfare agencies and many others.- Nampa-AP * The New York Times described Kuzwayo as “the lone woman and the least flashy of the founders of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and a quiet moral force throughout the rise of the African National Congress from outlaw movement to governing party”.It noted that ‘Call Me Woman’ described her beatings by her first husband and her loss of their children to him when they separated, because by law and tradition she was a minor Further, “In her 1996 testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated apartheid-era crimes, she described her predawn arrest, hiding in the bathroom trying to bathe and dress as police horses trampled her yard, and instructing Bobo [her son], then a teenager, to keep a sharp eye out so that the police did not plant evidence as they searched.She later helped establish the Urban Foundation, which pressed the government to let blacks own their houses, and she was a longtime adviser of the Zamani Soweto Sisters Council, the umbrella body for women’s self-help groups; the first president of the Black Consumer Union; and the General Secretary of the YWCA.Kuzwayo was born June 29 1914, in the Orange Free State, into a family of ministers and teachers.At 22, she began attending local ANC conferences with her father.In the 1940s, she joined Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and others in forming the breakaway African National Congress Youth League, a more militant offshoot, and served as its secretary.She became a teacher in 1938, but quit the profession in 1952 when the Native Education laws were supplanted by the Bantu Education Act, and missionary schools were closed.”I did not have the strength nor the courage to teach the children of my community what appeared to be very poisonous to their minds,” she said later.”The National Party gave them an inferior education so those children were going to remain the slaves of white people.”She became a social worker, eventually becoming a revered figure in Soweto, known as Ma K, giving advice to women’s groups, churches and schools and earning a salary from the social work department of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.One of her most common laments was the lasting damage that apartheid and the violent fight against it had done to South Africa’s children.In her early days as a social worker, she said, “Sometimes after sunset I would be going through Orlando Station to go to my home, and it would be dark, and if I saw a group of young men standing there, I just ordered them to take me home.””They would be grousing that they should be doing something else rather than taking this old lady home, but they obeyed.Believe you me, today I cannot do that, because I don’t trust the very children who ought to protect me because of the handling of the government of South Africa of those days.They turned our children into animals.”