Description
Like millions of black South Africans made strangers in the land of their birth, Ellen Kuzwayo lost a great deal in her lifetime: the farm in the Orange Free State which had belonged to her family for nearly a hundred years; her hopes for a full and peaceful life for her children; even her freedom, when, at the age of 63, she found herself detained under the so-called Terrorism Act for an offence never specified. This remarkable autobiography refuses to lose focus only on the author, for it draws on the unrecorded history of a whole people. Ellen Kuzwayo speaks for, and with, the women among whom she worked and lived.