Ethel de Keyser

Ethel de Keyser was a phenomenon. For nearly four decades up to the week of her death, she - more than anyone else - was "always there" in London, in selfless help for the victims and the needy of South Africa. Childless herself, she nurtured hundreds of "her children" in allocating funds for education: and never asked for gratitude.

Ethel Tarshish, human-rights campaigner: born Vilno, Poland 4 November 1926; OBE 2001; married 1949 David de Keyser (marriage dissolved 1959); died London 16 July 2004.

Ethel de Keyser was a phenomenon. For nearly four decades up to the week of her death, she - more than anyone else - was "always there" in London, in selfless help for the victims and the needy of South Africa. Childless herself, she nurtured hundreds of "her children" in allocating funds for education: and never asked for gratitude.

She was the supreme backroom helper and organiser. Political activists on trial and in need of funds to conduct their defence; destitute families of imprisoned activists; students unable to pursue their education because of lack of funds - all these she provided for from London, decade after decade, initially as a volunteer fund-raiser for the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), as executive secretary of the AAM and general dogsbody between 1967 and 1974, and as director of the British Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa (Bdafsa) from 1981 until after the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994.

De Keyser then started the Canon Collins Educational Trust for southern Africa, and remained in harness in London until the end of her life. She was due to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of the Western Cape, on behalf of her life's work, in September.

Education was a prime focus of Bdafsa. Together with Canon John Collins, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, de Keyser had set up the Educational Trust for Southern Africa, which survives both in the form of the Canon Collins Educational Trust. While the apartheid regime remained in force, the trust worked to provide South African and Namibian exiles with an education in Britain. After 1994, it addressed a legacy of structured inequality in the region - lack of healthcare in rural areas, the needs of the hearing impaired, and the impact of HIV/Aids.

For a whole era, Ethel de Keyser was Defence and Aid for Southern Africa. For 12 years of that time, her brother Jack Tarshish - seriously ill, suffering from narcolepsy - was himself a political prisoner in Pretoria Local Prison, following his arrest as a member of Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, in 1963. A devoted sister, she had returned to South Africa from London in 1960 after Jack was detained in the state of emergency that followed the massacre at Sharpeville. A year later she returned again and, with a British passport, was - in her own words - "able to help" people who were banned: "for example, being a messenger girl and driving people out of the country".

She wrote those characteristically low-key words on being appointed OBE for services to human rights in 2001, a number of years after her brother's death in London. In the same year she was invited to Windsor Castle to dine with the Queen during a state visit by President Thabo Mbeki, who sent an admiring message to her funeral.

On Jack's arrest in 1963 she had again returned to South Africa, but was arrested and deported. During his many years in prison he kept her photograph in his cell, framed in cardboard with a silver rim made from cigarette paper.

She was an exemplar of a now almost vanished breed, the South African Jewish left. It is not stretching matters to say that without this Jewish "left" there would have been no effective Communist Party, no effective link between white political activists and the African National Congress and no secure base for the reconciliation politics of Nelson Mandela or the "Rainbow Nation" of Archbishop Tutu. Out of all proportion to the numbers of Jews then in South Africa, it was this "left" - normally atheist, in most cases viscerally and no less bizarrely attached to the Soviet Union, deeply hostile to racism, adventurous in personal and social relations, and with the Holocaust to avenge - which more than any other grouping of whites in South Africa laid down their bodies as a bridge to Africa.

Not a Party member (unlike her brother), Ethel de Keyser was one of the most self-effacing and effective of these. Speaker after speaker at her funeral described her as "difficult". She was "difficult". She made life uncomfortable for nearly all who worked with her, urging people to do more than they wished through an implacable social conscience, her blunt questioning and relentless honesty.

She and Jack were born in Poland, and brought by their parents to South Africa when she was one month and Jack five years old. The Holocaust hung like a cloud over her. The racism of the South African state an ever- present reminder.

Her funeral at Golders Green Crematorium - the last exit for many South African exiles - was attended by former political prisoners, as well as wives, children and at least one grandchild of former political prisoners, along with three sitting British MPs, one of them, Peter Hain (with whom Ethel de Keyser had campaigned against apartheid in sport in the 1970s), a member of government. Anthony Sher, like her a South African Jew, read from Primo Levi: of the joy of spring sunshine in Auschwitz.

Married for 10 years in South Africa to David de Keyser, she had an important attachment later in London to the Trinidadian writer George Lamming, who sent an eloquent note to her funeral.

Paul Trewhela