General Sani Abacha (54), brutal Nigerian strongman and kleptocrat who seized power in a military coup in 1993. Official cause of death was a heart attack.
Chief Mashood Abiola (60), Nigerian businessman and winner of the annulled 1993 elections who was incarcerated by Abacha and died within days of the dictator when his release from jail was imminent. Cause of death also officially termed a heart attack.
Ameen Akhalwaya (52), campaigning South African journalist and founding member of Media Workers Association of South Africa.
Martin Bayer (66), legal pimpernel who smuggled millions in aid to lawyers of political activists during apartheid.
Dorothy Blair, founder member of the South African literary magazine, Classic, noted scholar and translator.
Sonny Bono (52), singer and former husband and partner of Cher.
Stoffel Botha (67), small-town lawyer and former minister of home affairs, who stoffelled out The Weekly Mail a decade ago.
Karla Faye Tucker Brown (39), convicted double-murderer who became the first woman to be executed in the United States since 1984. She was killed by lethal injection on February 3 after 14 years on death row and a religious conversion.
Kitch Christie (58), former rugby coach who led the Springboks to their 1995 Rugby World Cup victory.
Eldridge Cleaver (62), Black Panther.
Basil “Manenberg” Coetzee (54), legendary jazz musician and collaborator with Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand), who made his stage debut in 1954 playing the penny whistle.
Catherine Cookson (91), bestselling writer of romances and family sagas.
Allan Macleod Cormack (74), South African co-laureate of the Nobel Prize for X-ray innovation in 1979.
Raeford Daniel (66), renowned arts journalist and former arts editor of The Weekly Mail.
Achmat “Boeta” Davids (59), an academic whose work has been widely acknowledged as laying the foundation for a revisionist history of the Afrikaans language and of slaves at the Cape.
Judge John Didcott (67), progressive judge and one of the real liberals of the apartheid-era Bench, who was appointed one of the original members of the Constitutional Court.
Eric Gallo (94), founder of the Gallo record company.
Laurence Owen Vine Gandar, the first of a line of liberal editors of the Rand Daily Mail, who transformed the practice of journalism in South Africa.
Martha Gellhorn (89), legendary eyewitness journalist and former wife of Ernest Hemingway.
Archibald Jacob Gumede (84), veteran struggle leader and one-time close comrade of Albert Luthuli. He was instrumental in the formation of the United Democratic Front and became one of its presidents in 1983.
Ray Harmel (91), South African Communist Party stalwart. She was exiled from Lithuania at the age of 20 for communist activities and again from South Africa in 1963 by the apartheid government.
Ernest Urban Trevor Huddleston (84), former Anglican Bishop who was knighted by the queen for his role in the anti- apartheid struggle. He was known as the priest with a conscience because of the way in which he opposed the bulldozers in Sophiatown during the 1950s. Back in Britain, he was a driving force behind the anti-apartheid movement.
Ted Hughes (68), foremost poet of his generation, poet laureate and former husband of the writer Sylvia Plath.
Hammond Innes (84), bestselling writer of adventure fiction.
Florence Griffith Joyner (38), (pictured left) affectionately known as Flo-Jo, 100m and 200m sprinter who won three gold medals at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Akira Kurosawa (88), Japanese film director, famous for the Japanese Western Seven Samurai and for Rashoman.
General Andreas Jacobus Liebenberg alias “Kat” (60), commanded the South African Defence Force from 1985.
Oupa Makhendlas Mafokate (28), kwaito star who committed suicide after shooting a fan at a concert.
Tshepiso Mashinini (31), chief of urbanisation for the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, one of the brains who penned the White Paper on democratic transition of local government.
Djibril Diop Mambety, acclaimed Senegalese film maker.
Matsemela Manaka (42), playwright.
John Edward Matthews (85), veteran communist and one of the first Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) members, who was imprisoned for 15 years at Pretoria Central.
Linda McCartney (56), photographer, singer and wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney.
Jackie McGlew (69), South African cricketer.
Victor Mills (100), inventor of Pampers, the first mass-market disposable nappy, changing the lives of babies and their parents for ever.
Godfrey Moloi (64), reformed gangster, friend of the high and the mighty, who at last got to use the coffin that adorned the entrance to his Soweto shebeen, the Blue Fountain.
Denis Mpale (60), South African jazz musician.
Professor Sayed Habibul Haq Nadri (63), Islamic historian
Simon Nkoli (41), gay activist, one of the Delmas trialists, remembered chiefly for his role in bringing gay issues and the struggle against Aids to the forefront of South African politics.
Jake Ntuli (69), who won the British empire flyweight crown from Teddy Gardner in 1952.
Dorothy Nyembe (67), KwaZulu-Natal African National Congress, defiance campaign and MK stalwart.
Alan Pakula (70), film director who made Klute, Sophie’s Choice and All the President’s Men.
Victor Pasmore (89), British painter and sculptor.
Octavio Paz (84), Mexican writer and intellectual who won a Nobel prize for literature in 1990.
Carl Lee Perkins (65), country singer who did a version of Blue Suede Shoes shortly before Elvis Presley turned it into a hit.
Pol Pot (Solath Sar), Khmer Rouge leader, whose death was confirmed on April 15 following a host of false reports of his death in the preceding two years. Up to two million people died during his three-year rule of Cambodia between 1975 and 1978.
Enoch Powell (85), right-wing British politician, who made a speech in 1968 against immigration that lead to his dismissal from the shadow cabinet.
James Earl Ray (70), convicted killer of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Lord Rothermore (73), British press baron.
Tiny Rowland (80), British businessman and head of Lonhro, a controversial giant mining multinational with many operations in Africa.
Shamima Shaikh (37), a radical gender activist, who was acting chief executive officer of the Commission on Gender Equality, national executive committee member of the Muslim Youth Movement.
Tupac Amaru Shakur (27), radical American rap artist who was named by his mother for an Inca chief.
Jethro Shasha (46), Zimbabwean master drummer.
Alan Shepard (74), the first American in space and the fifth man to walk on the moon.
Barbara Silva (48), the beautiful former wife of heart transplant pioneer Chris Barnard.
Frank Sinatra (82), also known as “Ole Blue Eyes”, world-acclaimed crooner and sometime Mafioso, whose last words were, “Oh dear lord. Oh mother.”
Reg Smythe (81), creator of the Andy Capp cartoon strip, which appeared in more than 1 700 newspapers around the world, reaching more than 250-million people each day.
Dr Benjamin Spock (95), American pediatrician and anti-war activist. Spock’s books on child-care influenced the way a generation of parents raised their children, and he was blamed for a rise in bratty behaviour.
Lesley Stradling (89), former Anglican bishop of Johannesburg.
Sir Michael Tippet (93), British composer of modern classical music.
Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael (57), acclaimed pan- Africanist and American “black power” activist who became prime minister of the Black Panthers in 1968. He was once married to Miriam Makeba. He died in Ghana, where he had lived for many years.
George Wallace (79), US segregationist politician who barred blacks from entering the University of Georgia in the early 1960s. He later broke out of his racist mould after he experienced a degenerative disease and attended a black church service in 1979 in Montgomery to say that he was sorry to black people since he then understood what suffering was like.
Carl Wilson (51), member of the popular feel-good group, The Beach Boys, with hits like Good Vibrations and Surfin’ USA.
Tammy Wynette (55), queen of American country and Western, who made a big hit with Stand By Your Man.