With great care and meticulous research, Kally Forrest brings us the life of Lydia Komape, also known as Mam Lydia Kompe. Kally travels in Lydia?s footsteps, with family, friends, comrades and ancestors from Limpopo and Johannesburg to Cape Town where Lydia sat in Nelson Mandela?s parliament. Her family?s shattering loss of land in the 1930s deeply impacted Lydia?s life choices. She was fiercely independent, yet bound by the collective, forceful but consultative, humorous and deeply serious.