The main industry in the Transkei homeland village of Rietvlei is the hospital, a grim, green place where people mostly go to find out that they are dying. That's not entirely the hospital's fault. Many people still prefer the traditional healers or they are frightened by the electricity or the hard tile floors.

This was Philippina Mabuntana's world for 22 years. As regional health educator, she nagged 60 neighboring villages into doing better for themselves. She created a preventative approach to health care that incorporates African traditions.

The doctors did not share her vision. She acted on it anyway. Mabuntana established ten satellite clinics and 14 preschools where children are prepared for school and their growth and immunizations are monitored.

She convinces communities to plant vegetable gardens to provide residents with better nutrition. She encourages village women to set up sewing and craft cooperatives where they can learn earn income-producing skills and practice business expertise. She develops prenatal and malnutrition clinics and a school for young TB patients. She creates literacy classes for adults.

Mabuntana was born 64 years ago on a white South African farm in this same region. Her parents worked in slave-like servitude. She was doomed to follow in her parents' footsteps. But there was a moment in her childhood, perhaps a few hours, when an unusual opportunity opened for her. A Catholic priest convinced the white farmer's wife to allow the 13-year- old Mabuntana to do fewer chores in the kitchen so that the child could continue with her education. Mabuntana grasped every opportunity for education and training that came her way so that she could defy the apartheid system's attempts to diminish her and her people.

Mabuntana is a woman who could have broken away. But she cannot leave her less fortunate sisters behind. She says, "I cannot be false. My grave is here."

Modern South Africa has seen extraordinary leadership; leaders such as Nelson Mandela are larger than life to a world starved for genuine heroes. Then there are the Philippinas, those women who quietly prepared the next generation of South Africans for a better future, one child at a time. While the rest of the world argued about what South Africa's future should be, the hidden heroes found ingenious solutions to the daily problems created by deprivation. They absorbed the violence and the fear. They had the courage to cross racial lines, and to forgive. They refused to be dehumanized by the system.

Those women have propelled South Africa into a remarkable transformation. Philippina: she is South Africa, woman, song. She is love.