| SWOP associate, Kally Forrest, will be launching her new book with Jacana Media on the 19th September at Love Books in Melville. With great care and meticulous research, Kally Forrest brings us the life of Lydia Komape, also known as Mam Lydia Komape, a parliamentarian in Nelson Mandela’s government. Kally travels in Lydia’s footsteps, with family, friends, comrades and ancestors from Limpopo and Johannesburg to Cape Town. 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. Thursday 19 September 2024, 17:30 for 18:00 Love Books 53 Rustenburg Road Melville Johannesburg |
