Jewish, British and African anthropologist Hilda Kupe was born in 1911 in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, and grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. Kuper’s first fieldwork involved studying the impact of liquor laws on Black women in Johannesburg. Later, her research sites expanded to Swaziland and Indian communities in Durban, Natal, South Africa, where she formed life-long friendships and research partnerships with Swazi anthropologist Thoko Ginindza and South African Indian Muslim-Jewish sociologist Fatima Meer. Through her marriage to Leo Kuper, she became involved in non-violent apartheid protests as one of the founders of the Liberal Party and was forced to leave South Africa; she eventually became a Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. In her theorizing about Black women, Hilda took a 'Swazi point of view,' arguing that Westernization weakened women’s position. She portrayed Swazi women and Indian South African women as the victims of colonization as well as patriarchal indigenous systems. Hilda’s initial interests in law, acting, languages and history, morphed into her career as a legal and political anthropologist, novelist and playwright.