Inka Mars, who has died in Durban at the age of 89, was head of the Red Cross in South Africa and a member of parliament for the IFP for 15 years.
The achievement she was proudest of during her time as an MP was her contribution to the 2005 Children's Act, which she worked on for about five years.
The act made legal provision for the care and protection of children. It defined parental responsibility, provided for children's courts and dealt with adoption and surrogate motherhood.
It also gave children from the age of 12 access to HIV testing and contraceptives.
While head of the Red Cross in what was then Natal, Mars led relief efforts in rural areas of the province that were stricken by drought and the severe tropical storm Domoina in the 1980s.
She subsequently became national head of the Red Cross.
HEAVILY BOMBED
Inka Deppisch was born in Hamburg, Germany, on August 7 1928. She was 11 when World War 2 broke out and spent the war years in the port city, which was heavily bombed by the Allies.
After the war she went to London where she worked as an au pair for a Jewish couple.
While in London she met and married Paul Mars, who was a medical doctor.
They came to South Africa in 1951 when the National Party government was beginning to implement its apartheid policy.
She was particularly outraged by the closure of mission schools and imposition of bantu education. She was so distressed by what she saw that she and her husband returned to the UK. After a year or so there she decided that South Africa was where she was most needed, and they came back.
From then on she committed herself fully to the country and to opposing apartheid by bringing practical assistance to its victims.
She met Mangosuthu Buthelezi in the 1970s when she was working for the Red Cross in Zululand. Buthelezi, chief minister of what was then the homeland of KwaZulu, was struck by her unsentimental, practical approach to poverty alleviation in the region.
They developed a close and lasting friendship. Her husband became Buthelezi's family doctor and remained so until his death in 1995.
When Buthelezi started Inkatha in 1975, Inka Mars became an active member.
She shared Buthelezi's belief that a federal rather than unitary system offered the best chance for effective democracy in a post-apartheid South Africa .
Mars was a dynamic, resolute, strong-willed, no-nonsense person with impressive administrative and organisational skills, which she exercised to great effect as head of the Natal Red Cross.
She had a formidable capacity for hard work and always found a way to get things done no matter the challenges.
Hundreds if not thousands of people owed their lives to her during and after the terrible drought of 1980 that devastated large parts of rural Zululand.
Families were left without water after village wells dried up, and without food when their crops failed. Cattle died in their thousands.
Mars said that at least newspaper coverage of the drought publicised the desperate plight of rural people in the homelands created by the South African government in the name of grand apartheid.
"People are learning for the first time about the real conditions in the homelands and they are shocked," she said in a newspaper interview when she was leading a private drought relief effort headed by the Red Cross. "The drought has dramatised the situation for them."
When tropical storm Domoina struck the region in 1984, dumping 600mm of rain on it in three days, she organised, co-ordinated and directed emergency teams of doctors and the distribution of medical supplies, food and drinking water.
'TIRELESS EFFICIENY'
Buthelezi told a meeting of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva in Switzerland in 1985 that Mars was the nerve centre of humanitarian aid in KwaZulu. He said she "towered above everybody else in dynamic, tireless efficiency, working round the clock, arranging, organising, overseeing, travelling and succeeding".
What most struck him about her was her "ability to assess a situation fully and then to objectively and rationally do whatever needed to be done".
She was "the kind of person you wanted in your corner", he said. "I never saw her buckle under pressure."
She was a full-time participant in the Codesa talks in the early 1990s, representing the IFP. She became an MP in 1994 and retired in 2009.
Mars said her work for the Red Cross, which she pursued on a full-time and entirely voluntary basis for many years, was informed by the terrible suffering and deprivation she witnessed during the war in Germany. She said it impressed upon her the need to reach out and help, "because struggle and pain is all around us".
She is survived by two children.
1928-2017..