HELENA DOLNY

Helena Dolny is an international executive coach, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of four books. Her first book, Joe Slovo: The unfinished biography was published by Ravan Press in 1995. In 2001 Penguin published her second book, Banking on Change, and in 2009 she edited Team Coaching: Artists at work, also published by Penguin. Her latest title, Before Forever After, is out this month. It is a ground-breaking exploration of the subject of human mortality, and how ordinary people deal with the inevitability of their dying, or with losing a loved one. It explores different themes, including the often difficult choices and revelations that follow death.
In this wide-ranging interview with Africa Book Club, Dolny talks about her involvement with South Africa’s African National Congress, what led to write her latest book, her personal story of losing her mother and former husband, and hos this has influenced her.
Tell us a little about yourself. Where did you grow up and what has been your life journey so far?
I grew up in a small town, Accrington, in north-east England. It’s a town in a basin, surrounded by wilderness, one of series of towns which had cotton weaving and coal mining as the main industries when I was a child. I grew up as the Catholic child of Eastern European World War II refugees not really knowing ‘English’ people, as my schoolmates were all of Irish, Italian descent or like me. I took a gap year per-university and did the UK equivalent of Peace Corps. I spent a year as an assistant teacher on a mission school in Zambia. I traveled every school holiday and went to Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya but ended the gap year by traveling through South Africa and catching a boat from Cape Town back to UK. Those three weeks changed my life. I joined organizations supporting independence for Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau as well as going to anti-apartheid demonstrations.
I studied Agricultural Economics and when Mozambique became independent I went to work there and stayed ten years. The I moved to Lusaka to work on post-apartheid policy research and completed a PhD on land markets and their relevance to land reform. I worked in agriculture until 2005 when I changed professions, having completed a Masters in Executive Coaching. Now I try and work internationally. Besides the professional satisfaction of challenging work, it offers me a chance to maintain links with a family diaspora in Europe and the US. I have two daughters who a beginning their own families, one in Cape Town and one in Brooklyn and to date I have three grandchildren. But home is very much Johannesburg, where I live with my husband John Perlman, a social entrepreneur who founded Dreamfields, a soccer project for primary school children -as well as his being a radio talk show host.