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My mother, Katherine El-Salahi, who has died aged 80, was a publisher, anthropologist and anti-apartheid activist who championed independent publishing in the global south.

In her 20s she joined the London Recruits, a network of young white activists undertaking covert missions against the apartheid regime. Posing as a wealthy honeymooner, she smuggled weapons to the armed wing of the African National Congress – an operation she concealed until the publication of the 2012 book London Recruits: The Secret War Against Apartheid. When I later interviewed her for This American Life, she explained, with characteristic humility, that her reluctance to speak stemmed from an awareness that others “had done a hell of a lot more”.

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne into a privileged, liberal, secular Jewish family, she was the youngest child of Edna (nee Servian) and Samuel Levine, a businessman.

Katherine’s first foray into activism came at Bedales school in Hampshire, where, aged 14, she persuaded the kitchen to boycott South African marmalade. On leaving, she taught at southern Africa’s first multiracial school, Waterford, in Swaziland (now Eswatini), for a period, having been inspired by a talk given by Michael Stern, its founder.

The experience deepened her commitment to racial justice and shaped her academic path. She studied social anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge (1964–67), followed by a PhD at Soas, University of London (1967–72) and fieldwork linked to the University of Dar es Salaam (1968–70).

Returning to London in 1970, she was recruited by Ronnie Kasrils, a South African ANC and Communist party activist in exile, and took part in her first London Recruits mission in January 1971. Soon after, she became a founding editor of the Review of African Political Economy.

After marrying the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi in 1977, she moved to Qatar, where he was self-exiled, and ran her own academic and literary publishing house between Doha and London, Onyx Press (1978-86), specialising in Africa and the Middle East. Alongside this, she worked as a freelance editor and journalist for various publications in the UK and Middle East and also as a newsreader on the Qatar Television English Service.

In the early 90s my mother settled in Oxford, where she raised her four children while running the Bellagio Publishing Network, a coalition of publishers, book trade actors and development organisations dedicated to strengthening publishing across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Ibrahim remained in Doha for work before rejoining the family in 1998. In later life Katherine managed his career, and was instrumental in placing his works in museum collections worldwide, as well as making his 2013 Tate Modern retrospective possible.

Her conviction that justice and equality were principles to be lived was evident in her work, and her many letters published in the Guardian. Her home embodied that same spirit: a secular Jewish-Muslim joyous madhouse unconstrained by convention.

She is survived by Ibrahim and their children, Zaki, Zein, Shama and me, and grandchildren, Aaliyah, Zahara, Aya, Asa, Amel and Naima.