Not Without a Fight: The Autobiography, by Helen Zille

Not Without a Fight: The Autobiography, by Helen Zille. Penguin Random House South Africa (Zebra Press). Cape Town, South Africa 2015. ISBN 9781776090426 / ISBN 978-1-77609-042-6

Not Without a Fight: The Autobiography, by Helen Zille. Penguin Random House South Africa (Zebra Press). Cape Town, South Africa 2015. ISBN 9781776090426 / ISBN 978-1-77609-042-6

Helen Zille's autobiography, Not Without a Fight, is as frank, honest and unflinching as Helen Zille herself, and will appeal to anyone interested in the story of South African politics over the past fifty years.

When you start your memoirs, you think you are going to write your story, but you only begin to discover your story. In the process of writing mine, I found relatives I did not know existed and read memoirs I did not know had been written. I have excavated history's hidden chains and come to terms with life's unpredictability. My voyage of discovery started on a chilly autumn morning, 5 May 2015, in the Jewish cemetery in Pinelands, where I had been invited, as premier of the Western Cape Province, to attend the annual Yom Hashoah Holocaust memorial service. There I heard Ella Blumenthal, a ninety-three-year-old woman, make a short speech. I did not know her. I had never even met her. But as she spoke, she peeled away layers of my own life, releasing snippets of memory I am only now, in my mid-sixties, beginning to piece together. In a matter-of-fact tone, Ella recalled losing twenty-three members of her immediate family: her parents, her brothers, her sisters, their spouses, and eight nieces and nephews - cthe only other survivor being my eldest niece, Roma'. Her struggles and heartbreak remained untold. So private are these that when she moved to Johannesburg after marrying a South African she had known for just thirteen days, she had the tattooed concentration-camp number on her arm surgically removed. She told her children that the scar was the result of can accident'. Actually, I do know Ella Blumenthal. Almost everything about her is intimately familiar to me, from her strong accent, to her lack of sentimentality, to her determination to bury the past and keep moving forward. She propelled me back to my grandmother's tiny flat in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, in the late 1950s. Every second weekend my father, Wolfgang Zille, took me and my younger sister, Carla, to see her. As soon as she opened the door, we could smell the overripe Camembert she kept on a tray under a damp cloth next to the porcelain milk jug and butter dish, because she had no fridge. The highlight of each visit was sharing the Kit Kat she always produced, as a 'surprise'. I now regret that I did not ask her more about her life. Back then I was far more interested in when the Kit Kat would appear (we were not allowed to ask for it). In any event, it was difficult to communicate with Granny, because she had lost most of her hearing. She never learnt to 'listen with her eyes', as my sister Carla did from her earliest years, after sustaining hearing loss as an infant. Granny had become deaf in old age, and her other senses could not adapt. She spoke halting, broken English. I understood German, but Carla, because of her hearing loss, did not, and so we developed the multilayered communication methods that are part of life in families that incorporate deafness. Carla and I were fascinated by the large amplifier on Granny's hearing-aid, which she carried in the small breast-pockets sewn onto her blouses and dresses. If we moved it in a certain way, it squealed like our dachshund puppy. Apart from that, the only items of interest in her flat were two photos on the wall. One showed her parents, Ernestine and Hermann Marcus, with their thirteen children (of which my grandmother was the ninth, and the fifth daughter). [...]

This is an excerpt from Not Without a Fight: The Autobiography, by Helen Zille.

Title: Not Without a Fight
Subtitle: The Autobiography
Authors: Helen Zille
Genre: Autobiography
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa (Zebra Press)
Cape Town, South Africa 2015
ISBN 9781776090426 / ISBN 978-1-77609-042-6
Softcover, 15 x 23 cm, 544 pages, numerous photographs

Zille, Helen im Namibiana-Buchangebot

Not without a fight: The autobiography

Not without a fight: The autobiography

Not Without a Fight, Helen Zille’s long-awaited autobiography is one of the most fascinating political stories of South Africa.