The journalist Alex Duval Smith, who has died of cancer aged 55, was a free spirit with a remarkable gift for connecting with others across social, language or cultural barriers.

For more than two decades she worked as a reporter and correspondent in European and African countries, for the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer, the BBC, Radio France International and France 24. She had a deep knowledge of and love for Africa and was a citizen of the world – with two nationalities and three languages; she had lived in almost a dozen countries.

After a period in Paris, in 1998 she became the Guardian’s Africa correspondent, based in Johannesburg. It was her first assignment in Africa, from where she worked as a freelance after she left her staff position.

Over the years she reported on wars and violence, human rights violations and tragedies, but she never turned into a cynic nor did she develop a “white saviour” attitude. She respected the people she met for her other stories that showed life in villages, and the vibrant and diverse cultures of the countries she was based in: South Africa, Mali, Ivory Coast and Senegal.

Alex was an old school journalist – empathic, diligent and a seeker of the facts and the truth. She preferred to be “out in the field” rather than doing research from behind a desk. She could move with ease and charm at ambassadorial residences or presidential palaces, but her true self shone through when she was chasing stories on dusty village roads, in African markets, Polish coalmining towns or in the backstreets of Paris.

I met Alex as a fellow journalist when she came to Warsaw in 2015 as a freelance correspondent for the Guardian, having moved from Bamako, the capital of Mali. She did not know a word of Polish at that time, but faced the new challenge with enthusiasm, creativity and her wry sense of humour.

If her interviewees were not fluent in English, Alex would walk a mile to find someone’s son-in-law who had worked as a builder in the UK and who could translate. A group of giggling schoolchildren would proudly show off their English skills so that Alex could talk to a grandmotherly babcia running a village shop to find out how emigration to Britain had changed local communities.

Some of her best stories were about people who might otherwise have been overlooked, such as her piece on Doumbia – “Mali’s most dedicated postman” – for the BBC in 2015.

She would follow up on what had happened to some of the people she wrote about and sometimes get personally involved. When she was doing a story on gay activists organising a pride parade in a southern Polish town amid a great deal of homophobia, she ended up helping to print T-shirts for the march. After investigating forced early marriage in Mali, she stayed in touch to find out about the fate of some of the young girls.

For Alex, who came out as a gay woman in her 20s it was important to support human rights, women’s issues and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as write about them.

Born in London, she was the daughter of Peter Duval Smith, a journalist, screenwriter and BBC producer who died in 1967, and Daphne Jonason, an actor. Alex was too young to have known her father, but his picture hung over her desk wherever she worked.

Her mother had Swedish roots and they moved to Sweden when she was seven and attended the French lycée in Stockholm. Fluent in English, French and Swedish, she returned to London in the early 1980s and in 1986 she married Simon Clark, an actor with the RSC. The couple divorced amicably in 1993 and remained friendly. After that, she had several female partners with whom she maintained close relations throughout her life.

She began her journalism career working shifts as a subeditor at the Guardian in the mid-80s, before becoming part of the paper’s Europe section and then an assistant editor on the foreign desk. Her break as a foreign reporter came in 1995, when she was assigned a temporary post in Paris. She stayed on for three years, before being sent to Johannesburg.

While she was working as a producer for the BBC in Dakar, Senegal, she was diagnosed with a lung tumour. Alex faced her illness as she did everything in life – with courage and positivity, determined not to let it define her. She took up art and music classes. Only a few weeks before her death she planned to join a choir and had started a new project – a children’s book on cancer, told from the perspective of a dog, inspired by her Jack Russell terrier, Tertius.

Alex is survived by two half-sisters and a half-brother, as well as by those she called her social family.

• Alex Duval Smith, journalist, born 28 October 1964; died 7 December 2019