Noni Jabavu: A peripatetic writer ahead of her times

When Noni Jabavu died in June last year, I had just talked about her biography a few days earlier at the Cape Town International Book Fair. I was the only person on that four-person panel whose biography was still ‘work-in-progress’. Her death brought that progress to a pause. It numbed me to inaction in ways I had not expected. I realized then that my emotional connection to her was much stronger than I had acknowledged to myself. Although I had spoken to her only once, for no longer than 5 minutes in 2005, I had carried the story of her life with me for much too long. As I continue to unearth and piece it together I grow in my belief that she was a woman who lived way ahead of her times.