Ruth Weiss, a South African journalist "forged by the Nazi persecution she experienced as a child in Germany, who covered the malignant flowering of apartheid in the early 1960s and later wrote about the brutal white regime in Rhodesia before being expelled from the country," died September 5, the New York Times reported. She was 101.
Her life, articles, and many books "were shaped by twin experiences of discrimination: first, as a girl, when her life was upended after the Nazis came to power in 1933, and then, three years later, when her family immigrated to Johannesburg on one of the last refugee boats allowed into South Africa. From being an object of exclusion and persecution, she became a witness to it. And like many other refugee Jews, she became a determined opponent of apartheid," the Times wrote.
"Blacks under apartheid--Jews under the swastika. Was it all that different?" she asked in 1979 during a lecture in Nuremberg, Germany, recounted in her 2014 memoir, A Path Through Hard Grass: A Journalist's Memories of Exile and Apartheid. In the introduction, her friend Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist, praised Weiss's "natural modesty."
During the early 1960s, she became the business editor of the South African magazine News Check and later was a correspondent for the country's leading business weekly, Financial Mail. In 1966, she was offered a job by the Financial Mail as bureau chief in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). By 1968, she was living in London and working at the Guardian. "I was not allowed to return to Rhodesia, nor indeed to South Africa," she wrote. "I received the order forbidding my entry with the threat of instant arrest if I as much as set a foot on Rhodesian soil while I was working at the Guardian."
After her stint at the Guardian, Weiss returned to Africa in 1970 as business editor of the Times of Zambia, and five years later, she moved to Germany to serve as the Africa expert at Deutsche Welle. By the late 1970s she was back in London, working as a freelance journalist, and in the 1980s was training journalists in the newly independent Zimbabwe.
Weiss spent much of the 1990s living on the Isle of Wight in England, where she wrote novels, children's books, and nonfiction. Her books translated into English include Zimbabwe and the New Elite (1994); Sir Garfield Todd and the Making of Zimbabwe (1999, with Jane Parpart); and Peace in their Time: the Peace Process in Northern Ireland and Southern Africa (2000).
In the introduction that Gordimer wrote for A Path Through Hard Grass, she lauded Weiss's "innovative intelligence, political acumen and courage to take risks," adding that she was "the most humane woman I have ever met."