Call Me Woman

Description for CALL ME WOMAN by Ellen Kuzwayo with a preface by Nadine Gordimer and a foreword by Bessie Head:

How does it feel to be a black woman in South Africa? Like millions of black South Africans made strangers in the land of their birth, Ellen Kuzwayo has 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 own freedom, when, at the age of 63, she found herself detained under the so-called Terrorism Act for an offence never specified. But she has not lost her courage.

This remarkable autobiography refuses to focus only on the author, for it draws on the unrecorded history of a whole people. In telling her own personal and political story over 70 years, Ellen Kuzwayo speaks for, and with, the women among who she live and works. Their courage and dignity remain a source of wonder.