An Outsider Within

’In 1966, at the age of 23, I made a life-changing decision.’ That decision, to travel from Canada to Zambia to work as a volunteer teacher, did indeed change Mary’s life. During her years in Lusaka, she married Edward Ndlovu, an executive member of the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union, who had escaped from Rhodesia in 1964. They married, started a family, and moved to the newly independent Zimbabwe in 1980Over the next 36 years, before retiring to Canada, Mary’s life was a blend of politics, teaching, human rights advocacy, and writing NGO histories. The book is particularly candid and insightful about issues of race and culture: raising children of mixed race in an historically segregated educational system; dealing with the responses of traditional medicine to the AIDS epidemic; learning to fit in with a large extended family.Her experience as the widow of a National Hero, and her engagement with a range of civil society organisations, gave her an intimate proximity to political developments in the new Zimbabwe, and she writes of these with clarity, honesty and moral courage.