When I’m dead, you make sure that ordinary people, ordinary rural women, must be at the forefront of my funeral. I want my rural women to be there at the forefront: people that know me well.’

With great care and meticulous research, Kally Forrest brings us the life of Lydia Komape, also known as Mam Lydia Kompe. Kally travels in Lydia’s footsteps, with family, friends, comrades and ancestors from Limpopo and Johannesburg to Cape Town where Lydia sat in Nelson Mandela’s parliament.

Her family’s shattering loss of land in the 1930s deeply impacted Lydia’s life choices. She was fiercely independent, yet bound by the collective, forceful but consultative, humorous and deeply serious.

Lydia closely identified with rural women, remarking, ‘We are so discriminated against, but we are made to work like donkeys. We do all the dirty work – you must go and plough, hoe, harvest, carry water, fetch wood, and men are just sitting drinking alcohol under the tree.’

This is a biography that will open your eyes and heart.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kally Forrest is a former trade unionist and editor of the South African Labour Bulletin. She has written biographies of organisations and how they impact individuals. This book however looks at an individual’s impact on the broader society during and after apartheid. She was a Ruth First Fellow and a senior researcher on the Marikana Commission, and is currently an associate of the Society Work & Politics Institute and the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, both at the University of the Witwatersrand, and a fellow of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg.

'Lydia: Anthem to the Unity of Women' is published by Jacana Media