Ellen Kuzwayo, 91; Women’s Rights Activist Fought Apartheid

Ellen Kuzwayo, a leading figure in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and a champion of women’s rights in her country, has died. She was 91.

Kuzwayo died April 22 in Johannesburg, according to the country’s news media. Family members said that she had been hospitalized for much of April and that her death was caused by complications from diabetes.

The first black to be awarded South Africa’s CNA Literary Prize, for her autobiography “Call Me Woman,” Kuzwayo was an influential member of the African National Congress during the apartheid era.

She became the only woman on the Committee of 10, which governed the sprawling black township of Soweto after 1976 riots that were brought about by police killings of schoolchildren protesting the implementation of Afrikaans as the official language in schools.

Her role in the Committee of 10 led to her arrest and a five-month detention without charge in 1977.

In 1994, she was elected to Parliament in the first all-races election.

Born in the Orange Free State, a farming region dominated by Afrikaners, Kuzwayo was educated at missionary schools. She inherited the family farm at the death of her parents only to lose it in the 1970s when the area was designated for whites only.

As a young woman, she began attending African National Congress meetings with her father.

Along with other ANC figures, including Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, she was one of the founders of the African National Congress Youth League, a militant splinter group that broke away from the ANC. She served as secretary of the new group.

She took up teaching in her mid-20s and stayed with that profession until 1952, when she turned to social work; she thought what was being taught in schools was demeaning to blacks.

Published in 1985, “Call Me Woman” is not only an autobiography, but also deals with the hardships of black women in South Africa.

“My motivation to move from social work to writing was to record some of the striking -- sometimes very shocking -- revelations of my practice, particularly conditions under which black women lived and survived under the stringent laws of apartheid, and also under oppressive traditional practices,” she once told an interviewer.

She later published a book of short stories, “Sit Down and Listen: Stories From South Africa.”

She is survived by two sons, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.