LYDIA, anthem to the unity of women

230pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Johannesburg, 2024

Biography of activist, trade unionist and politician Lydia Komape, also known as Mam Lydia Kompe (1935-2023). She represented the ANC in the National Assembly from 1994 to 2009 and in the Limpopo Provincial Legislature from 2009 to 2019. Komape rose to political prominence in the mid-1970s as one of the few senior women in the Metal and Allied Workers' Union. In 1986, she returned to the rural Transvaal where she grew up, worked for the Black Sash and founded the Rural Women's Movement. In 2009, President Kgalema Motlanthe awarded Komape the Order of Luthuli in Bronze for her "commitment to workers' rights, the empowerment of rural women and the liberation of our people."

Kally Forrest is a former trade unionist and editor of the South African Labour Bulletin. 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.