On what was to be the last day of her life, Sitshengisiwe Dlodlo woke up with a knowing deep in her bones that she was just about to fulfil her life’s purpose. She set off for work in her usual blue-purple oversized overalls, but somewhere along the way she saw the headlines announcing the dates for the upcoming elections – the elections that would usher in majority rule – and she decided it was as good a day as any to start her new life. She returned home and put on her best dress, a gorgeous georgette dress she had saved for and bought at Sales House herself. The air was filled with independence, and so she went to the National Breweries to tender her resignation. For her, there would be no more checking the quality of beer bottles as they passed through the assembly line, and, if she could help it, her husband Philemon would not be the Rutherfords’ garden boy for much longer.

As she waited at a bus stop on Mafeking Road, she was filled with so much anticipation of a brighter future that she removed from her handbag the magic marker she used to tally the number of defective bottles and wrote on the wall of the bus-stop shelter: ‘And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the great is love.’

In writing this quotation on the wall, Sitshengisiwe did three things: the first and most obvious being that she misquoted the verse of scripture, because she could see the bus coming from up the road and had written the quotation in haste; the second being that she had defaced public property and had thus broken the law; and the third – definitely the most important and also the least apparent – being that she, unlike many women in her position, had written something that would long outlive her and would be read by and inspire many people in the years to come.

Sitshengisiwe, having written the quotation and thus left her mark, had then boarded the bus, paid the conductor and received her small white square ticket from the driver before sitting on the first two-seater at the front. For the duration of the short distance to Founders High School, which was her destination, she valiantly warded off the rather determined advances of the conductor, who chose to ignore the ring on her finger, even though she kept turning it around and around and around until it had no choice but to regain some of the sparkle it had lost a long time ago.