quaker who speaks truth to power.(News)

BYLINE: Terry Bell

Sacked deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge has been very much in the limelight recently. But only because it sought her. Which is how it has always been, first because of underground political activity and later through religious conviction.

For Madlala-Routledge was once a courier and underground operative for both the ANC and the South African Communist Party. She spent much of the turbulent 1980s in KwaZulu-Natal, constantly on the move and trying to blend into the background while working as a medical technician.

But she entered the new dispensation as a Quaker, having become a member of the Religious Society of Friends in 1987. Two years later, one of them spent in detention, she married fellow Quaker Jeremy Routledge, now a University of Cape Town academic and peace activist.

She remains a Quaker, one of that small and disproportionately influential group whose members have, over a period of 355 years, often been labelled heretics, traitors and troublemakers, and who have been derided, beaten, tortured, jailed and, on occasion, killed.

Yet the Quakers have also been lauded for their sincerity. And been praised - often with hindsight - for their far-sightedness. They have also frequently been patronised for naive idealism. …