In her long life of service to her people, Ellen Kuzwayo was a teacher, a social worker, an anti-apartheid activist, organizer and patron of women's self-help groups, community councillor, member of parliament and writer. When she died in April this year all South Africans joined in celebrating her life and mourning her passing.

She began writing quite late in her life, her landmark autobiography Call Me Woman (1985) being her first book. Her wise, dignified and gently smiling face looking out from the cover both underwrites the challenge of her title and prepares for the surprises and inspiration within. It is not the intimate story that readers of conventional autobiography might expect, for it takes the socio-political conditions and events in Soweto during the long struggle for liberty and justice in South Africa as its focus and organizing principle. Consequently the three-part narrative (Soweto; My Road to Soweto; Patterns Behind the Struggle) is as much an account of the beliefs and lives of Ellen Kuzwayo's comrades and compatriots as it is her own story. It was published during the darkest years of the struggle but Kuzwayo's hope for a just outcome never wavers, even when her own sons are under attack. She sets an example of personal fortitude that is inspiring to all who read it. These are her selfless closing words with her characteristic emphasis: "The commitment of the women of my community is my commitment - to stand side by side with our menfolk and our children in this long struggle to liberate ourselves and to bring about peace and justice for all in a country we love so deeply." Bessie Head responded, from exile, to the courage and humility with which Kuzwayo told her story of moving from a rural life steeped in tradition to the harsh townships of an industrialized world: "at the end of the book one feels as if a shadow history of South Africa has been written; there is a sense of triumph, of hope in this achievement and that one has read the true history of the land, a history that vibrates with human compassion and goodness." Call Me Woman was awarded the prestigious CNA prize in 1985; it was the first time that a black author had received it.

For her story's closing credo, Kuzwayo chose a Tswana proverb which translates as 'The child's mother grabs the sharp end of the knife', and, for her valediction, the prayer that has become South Africa's national anthem: Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. Her gesture celebrating African culture was what she then expanded in her next two books. The first is a collection of short stories and fables called Sit Down and Listen (1990) and the second is African Wisdom: A Personal Collection of Setswana Proverbs (1998). The context of the latter book was radically different from that of her autobiography in that the democratically elected government for which she had worked for so long was then in its fourth year - she herself had only recently retired from service as a member of parliament when she published it - but its context of concern was also tragically similar for, as she said, she was "haunted by the [still] prevailing violence: the abuse of young girls, the rape of young and old women, the car-theft, the senseless killings of people." And, she continues, as "I ... racked my mind for remedies, I had to conclude that any effective remedy would have to combine a variety of solutions. And the language of proverbs struck me as one of the instruments, which could help." These proverbs are, she says, what constituted her mother's strict education of her as a child on her family's farm in the Thaba 'Nchu district of the Free State. Her faith in publishing the proverbs indicates her own maternal wish to educate her readers. Ellen Kuzwayo was known as 'Mother of Soweto'; through her writing this pragmatic, modest and upright woman offered guidance to us all.