ON FAMILY
My paternal grandmother was a blind woman who was gifted with handcrafts and cooking. I still can't find anything that comes close to the way she used to cook. She was so independent even though she was blind. She had a profound influence on me.
As a kid she told me stories about times long before colonialism. She told me about this great civilisation that Africa once had, the Kush, and how this civilisation crumbled because its leaders started trading in slaves. In my grandmother's tales, she drilled into me that if you romanticise your history you can never change.ON ACTING
I never lacked confidence. As a child I was leader of the drum majorettes and I loved to sing and act. My mother was part of a stokvel and I would put on a performance that was very popular - I played this corrupt treasurer who took the money the women were putting together and used it for her own things ... in the play the community members would beat me up and then I repented and became this fundamentalist Christian. People loved it.ON YOUTH ACTIVISM
At 12 I joined the DCO Matiwane youth movement and by 14 I was in the leadership of the Natal Youth Organisation, which was affiliated to the South African Youth Congress. In 1984 we went to Transkei to attend the funeral of two shop stewards who had been gunned down. I gave a speech on behalf of the youth. We were in this rural village and for so many there I think it was the first time they had seen a young person speaking with that passion.
I was a real revolutionary. The Echo, a community newspaper in KZN, called me Lady Siyay'nyomfa - the disrupter. The youth and the women in that village were really taken aback, here was this person challenging everything ... and so I was detained. Out of 10 buses, the police singled out just two of us.I got out of prison and had to flee my home. I lived with [anthropologist] Patti Henderson, then Yunus Carrim [now chairman of parliament's standing committee on finance]. Yunus always jokes about how, when I first lived in his house, he found me sitting in the dark because the electricity had tripped. Where I grew up we did not have electricity, we had candles; I did not know about trip switches. His partner Sue would buy that cheese that looks like it's rotten. I would take it out of the fridge and throw it away.
For most of that time I lived with the family of [archaeologist and anti-apartheid campaigner] Aron Mazel, but I was really the child of everybody in Pietermaritzburg.
ON BEING A WOMAN
I became a feminist at a very young age. I challenged the way things were done at home, why I was always the one sent to fetch water, the one who did everything while my older brother did nothing. Later I was very involved in the Natal Organisation of Women.
When I was six years old I was raped. I don't want to go into the details ... things were resolved. It made me stronger as an adult, but also isolated. Boys were always a bit frightened of me, even comrades. They would never take advantage of me, they knew where to draw the line. Being so unavailable probably deprived me of good boyfriends. I was always cautious, I only wanted to talk politics.ON LOVE AND MARRIAGE
When I met my husband, Ntela Sikhosana, he was commander of Umkhonto weSizwe in Angola. He came to South Africa now and again and we were very close friends, but we did not have a relationship until much later on. He was sent to Robben Island and he would write to me, but I was scared of getting involved with him while he was in prison. When he was released in 1991, we hit it off.
He's the best thing that ever happened to me. He really shaped me. Ntela spent a lot of time in Russia, in Cuba, he was well-travelled and a very sensitive man. When I was deputy mayor he would say to me: "You know my love, I know you. You are very opinionated, and the reality is, when liberation movements become ruling parties, they change. I don't see you surviving."
I think it was good my husband had that foresight. But he also said to me: "I don't want you to lose your voice. We need this voice."
When he died I was 28. My son was nine months old and my daughter was five. I buried myself in studies. Life was so confusing. One day, when I forgot to pick my daughter up from school, she said to me: "God is unfair; you should have been the one that died." We laugh about it now but even then I understood ... everything crumbled after my husband died. He was my pillar of strength.
Now it is the three of us. My children and I are very close, they phone me every day. It has been a tough time for us. Not being able to go home was the hardest, but I think my children understand that I am not just doing this for them, I am doing it for the country.ON HER CAREER
I was deputy mayor of Pietermaritzburg when I was 26, as well as chair of the executive committee, driving the policy and budget processes of the municipality.
After my husband died I went to Joburg and worked as head of public sector finance for Standard Corporate and Merchant Bank.
Later I returned and served in the legislature in KZN as chair of the standing committee on public accounts and finance. But the ANC has this tradition of upward demotion - if you are causing trouble they remove you. I was fighting against corruption in the province and so they made me chief whip - at provincial level this is very boring. So in 2012 I resigned and went back to Joburg as group executive officer for Akani Retirement Fund Administrators, but I was then voted in absentia as member of parliament.
People in KZN wanted me in the provincial legislature, because they thought I could make a difference there, but the ANC sent me to national parliament. There are a lot of MPs who have been pushed to Cape Town because the party doesn't know what to do with them.ON PUBLIC ATTENTION
When we had the public protector process there was a lot of pressure on the ANC and I think they reasoned that they needed somebody with credibility to manage the process. I think that's how many South Africans probably got to know that there was somebody like that who existed in parliament.
ON RACE
As a child I never had a problem about being black because I was in isolation, so I never really bothered about what was going on, until I suddenly drew the parallels and began to question. I think our children today probably experience racism more than we did. Because we were in isolation, we were not constantly being reminded that we are black.
I think the ANC has lost its nonracial character. Every day we are breaking it. Given our past it is easy, instead of focusing on what we should be doing, to go, "Maybe I'm better off with my own, clapping with my own, maybe I will get some protection there." Everybody starts to think in black and white, it's us and them, especially because leadership keeps on saying this. It's tragic...