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T’S always a challenge to finalise a book whose author dies before it is quite complete. Books emerging from the resulting valedictory labours of love are often flawed, but no less valuable. Dene Smuts’s daughter, Julia Smuts Louw, herself a writer of exceptional flair, probably has something to do with the elegance of this book — which has also been carefully copy edited. It was she who chose the title, taken from Emily Hobhouse’s words describing “those who live in the country, and love it, and those who live on it”.

Nevertheless, for those familiar with Smuts’s writing from her journalism days, there is no mistaking her forthright and mordantly funny voice, her ability to skewer, her crisp prose. Her account of the property clause in the Constitution as “a kind of mermaid [with a] long and fishy tail of subclause after subclause” is vintage Smuts.

This memoir, a history of 25 years in Parliament and a valuable account of the making of the Constitution, is an important marker on the map of South African political analysis. The reminders of what many of us have forgotten or never knew, the insider views, and her trademark fearlessness more than compensate for the unpolished or truncated passages.

Smuts wrote this book after her “retirement” in 2014, with characteristic passion for her ideals, but surprising lack of heat given that she often describes herself as “incensed” or “incandescent with rage”. There is none of the score-settling that can mar political memoirs — although she takes no prisoners. Thabo Mbeki, in particular, is not spared, although her critique of his legacy focuses on his interest in keeping open the wounds of racism, rather than his shameful obtuseness on HIV/Aids, which cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives.

One might not agree with Smuts’s liberal politics, and I remain unconvinced by her arguments on hate and “hurt” speech — it is not enough to dismiss the Sparrows of this world as pathetic and irrelevant — but there is no denying the integrity of her principles, and the terrier-like tenacity with which she guarded those principles — particularly equality — as part of the backbone of the post-1994 political dispensation.