Gripping my small brown school suitcase, I was awestruck at the sight of my furious mother striding across the road and grabbing the shirt collar of a boy who was slapping his little sister around on their way home from school. She gave him such a dressing down that I doubt he ever bullied his sister like that again.Mom never lectured us on what was right or wrong. She didn’t need to. Her actions and the way she lived, caring for all in her community, were example enough. Years later, I found myself unconsciously emulating her when I encountered a bully while walking from the bus stop to my job as a reporter on Johannesburg’s biggest morning newspaper. An elderly white man was reigning blows upon a poor black beggar as he crouched abjectly on the pavement. Words were my weapons as I drove him off, furious at the injustice I was witnessing.It was the height of apartheid in South Africa and injustice was all around. I saw too much of it in the daily diet of news we served up, but remained fascinated by those who had the courage to stand up and resist. I wrote their stories and shared them with the world.I interviewed conscientious objectors, young men who chose to go to gaol or skipped the country rather than be conscripted into the apartheid army to prop up the regime through the barrel of a gun. I kept vigil through the night with rural peasants awaiting forced removal in army trucks at dawn because the government had rezoned their land for whites. I cried with the mother of a lad who was in the wrong spot when a resistance fighter’s bomb went off in a public place.Democracy finally came to South Africa and I’ve found other ways to help grow the collective consciousness of the nation in a more positive direction. But stories of courage and resilience, of the human spirit triumphing over adversity, will always be worth telling.