‘My life’s biggest battle’

In her autobiography, Not Without A Fight, Zille writes about her biggest personal battle: anorexia. “When I was a teenager, I was a little bit plump, like I am today and happily plump today, but I wasn’t happily plump then. It was the era of Twiggy, it was the era of really skinny women with jutting collar bones and all that sort of thing and I just wanted to be like that … I went on a diet and, being like I am, I worked it out and I then stopped eating and couldn’t reverse that. It took me about 10 years to get over it and it was my life’s biggest battle.”