newsRuth Weiss – Happy birthday to a woman of courage and dignity who helped free Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa
Happy birthday Ruth Weiss – A courageous woman who celebrates her birthday in Denmark today. (Picture by Trevor Grundy soon after Zimbabwe’s Independence in 1980)
Today, Saturday July 26, 2025, is Ruth Weiss’s birthday.
Those who read this know her as a highly respected author and novelist and an opponent of dictatorship whenever- and wherever – it shows its face.
It’s not my intention to write a lengthy article about a woman I have come to know and respect over the decades. But I am pleased I took a picture of her when she was at her fiery best in the 1980s in Harare where she taught so many young journalists the art of writing well and truthfully about mainly economic and financial affairs.
It’s just a short message to her, her son, Sacha, and those who know and love her around the world.
To those who want the full story about her life (she’s 101 today) should get hold of her autobiography “A Path Through Hard Grass” which has a foreword by Nadine Gordimer. There is much about her on various websites and an excellent article about her life in The Rift -The exile experience of South Africans by Hilda Bernstein (Jonathan Cape, 1994).
Since the 1970s, Ruth Weiss became known as a Zeitzeugin in (historical witness). She she speaks regularly in Holocaust seminars about her experience of growing up in Nazi Germany, leaving home for South Africa, her life there, rise as a journalist and as an anti-apartheid activist and novelist.
Happy birthday, Ruth.
And thanks.