Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (Women Writing Africa) - Hardcover

MAMPHELA RAMPHELE is vice-chancellor of the University of Capetown in South Africa. JOHNNETTA B. COLE is past president of Spelman College.

In this important autobiography, a black South African physician writes with dramatic immediacy about her struggle for personal and political independence. She begins with her rural childhood and years in medical school; describes her time as political activist with her lover, Steve Biko; and finally talks about her present position as vice-chancellor at the University of Cape Town. While Biko was tortured and finally murdered in prison in the 1970s, she was bearing his child in a wilderness area where she had been banished by government decree. She talks frankly about her passionate, stormy relationship with Biko, and she attacks the reverential "Gandhi" view of him promulgated in the movie Cry Freedom. What gives her story special power is not only the political freedom story, but her honesty about her failures and her fury and her survivor guilt. There's deep commitment here, but no martyrdom, no preening. Women everywhere will recognize her conflicts about her roles as mother, academic, political activist, lover, and friend. Hazel Rochman