Ruth Weiss was a German-born South African writer who focused on anti-racism in all its forms. She was a well-known anti-apartheid journalist and activist, exiled by South Africa and Rhodesia for her writings. She was based in Denmark and wrote in both English and German. Her historical fiction for young adults reflects her battles against racism in Germany and Africa. She is no more, left us at age 101 and mourned by millions around the world!
Ruth Weiss was born in 1924 at Fuerth, near Nuremberg, the daughter if Richard Lowenthal, a toymaker turned shopkeeper, and Selma (nee Cohen) who worked in the shop alongside her husband.
Ruth died at the home of her son, Alexander, and his family in Denmark on Friday September 5, 2025.
Her life and her struggle spanned an age that witnessed both tragedy and triumph in Europe and Africa.
The family was forced to leave Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933.
Ruth arrived in South Africa in 1936 and went on to be one of the continent’s best -known fighters against apartheid – using a pen rather than a gun to dismantle one of the great crimes of the 20th century.
Ruth was a well-known figure in South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania and all the other “frontline states” which united in the 1970s and 1980s to dismantle apartheid after ridding Rhodesia of all white rule in 1980.
She worked for the Financial Times, African Business and Deutsche Welle and during her long life wrote novels and a moving biography called A Path through Hard Grassa that told the story of a Jewish family and the way its members survived the dark days of the Holocaust in Europe and state- sponsored racial discrimination in South Africa,
Ruth became a personal friend of some of the great African leaders of the post-colonial era, including Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and Nelson Mandela.
She will never be forgotten.
- Trevor Grundy
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