Lilian Ngoyi
The first woman elected to the African National Congress’s national executive committee and awarded Isitwalandwe, the ANC’s highest honour. Ngoyi helped launch the Federation of South African Women, and in 1956 led the march of 20 000 women to Pretoria to protest against pass laws. A treason trialist , she was also arrested during the 1960 state of emergency and spent time in solitary confinement. Ngoyi died in 1980.
Breyten Breytenbach
Afrikaans poet whose work has been translated into Dutch, English, French and German. In 1960 he left South Africa and was arrested on his return in 1975. Charged with planning a white wing of the ANC, named Atlas or Okhela, he was sentenced to nine years in jail under the Terrorism Act. Released in 1982, he left for France and became a French citizen.
Eric Bhamuza Sono
Former Orlando Pirates captain and father of Jomo Sono, Sono was one of the best sportsmen of his era, winning the Post and Drum sportsman of the year awards for boxing in 1963. He was also a pioneer of non-racial sport. In the 1960s he ignored the National Party decree that people should only compete within their own race. He discovered the young Kaizer Motaung and Percy ”Chippa” Moloi. Sono died in a car crash in 1964, aged 27.
Basil D’Oliviera
Born in 1931 in Cape Town, D’Oliviera played for the South African Cricket Board of Control, which catered for black cricketers. As a ”coloured”, D’Oliviera was barred from the national team. But he was selected for England in 1966 and became a regular fixture. His exclusion from the 1968/69 tour to South Africa gave enormous impetus to the sports boycott. In 2003 he received the order of Ikhamanga.
Victoria Mxenge
Born in 1942, Mxenge studied law and in 1981 joined the law firm of her husband Griffiths as an attorney. In 1984 Griffiths was killed when the couple’s Umlazi house was petrol-bombed. Active in the United Democratic Front, (UDF) she became a member of the Natal Organisation of Women. Mxenge was part of the defence team for the UDF and the Natal Indian Congress during the Pietermaritzburg Treason Trial. She was assassinated in 1985.
James Mpanza
Known as the ”Father of Soweto”, Mpanza formed the Sofasonke (”We all die together”) Party in 1935 under the slogan ”housing and shelter for all”. Mpanza, a former court interpreter and convicted murderer, encouraged residents of Orlando to build houses on council-owned veld, one of the country’s first documented land invasions.
Richard J Goldstone
One of South Africa’s most eminent jurists, Judge Goldstone was born in 1938 and studied law at Wits University. He chaired the Goldstone commission of inquiry between 1991 and 1994, which found that political violence was fuelled by a ”third force”. A Constitutional Court judge for nine years, he moved abroad to serve human rights causes in the legal field, including the UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He has received many local and international awards.
Pixley ka Isaka Seme
Born in 1882, Seme studied law at the University of Columbia and Oxford University and was called to the Bar in London. Returning to South Africa in 1910, he became an attorney. Appalled by the living conditions of Africans, Seme and three other African lawyers called a conference with chiefs and others in 1912 in Bloemfontein. This resulted in the formation of the South African Native National Congress, later the ANC. Seme died in 1951.
Bram Fischer
The son of the Judge President of the Free State and grandson of a state president of the Free State, Fischer, a Rhodes scholar, was destined for high position in the apartheid judiciary. He joined the Communist Party and was harassed for decades in his practice as an advocate until his imprisonment in 1964. He died in prison in 1976.
Gert Sibande
ANC activist and farm workers’ leader in the eastern Transvaal, Sibande was known as the ”Lion of the East”. In the 1930s he started a farm workers’ association, and helped expose near-slavery conditions on Bethal farms. Deported from Bethal in 1953, he was an accused in the Treason Trial. He was banished from Komatipoort and died in Swaziland in 1987.
Es’kia Mphahlele
Es’kia Mphahlele was born in Marabastad, Pretoria, in 1919. As a high school teacher he was banished for defying the introduction of Bantu education. In 1969 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 1984 was awarded Les Palmes Academiques by the French government for his contribution to French language and culture. In 1998 he was awarded the Order of the Southern Cross.
William Kentridge
Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, Kentridge is regarded as South Africa’s most important living artist. He studied at Wits University and the Johannesburg Art Foundation from 1976 to 1978. In 2003 he received Germany’s Goslar Kaisserring Award, previously won by Henry Moore and Gerhard Richter.
Gerard Sekoto
Gerard Sekoto was born in 1913 at Botshabelo. Drawing from an early age, he produced vibrant depictions of township culture in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, District Six and Pretoria. Sekoto went into exile in Paris in 1947 and never returned. His work has won increasing recognition through the research of Barbara Lindop. He died in 1993.
Dolly Rathebe
Rathebe first rose to fame in the 1949 film Jim Comes to Jo’burg where the 19-year-old played a nightclub singer. A resident of Sophiatown, she soon became the nation’s sweetheart. In the 1950s she sang with top Johannesburg bands such as the Manhattan Stars and the Harlem Swingsters. In 1964 Rathebe began to sing with the Afro-jazz group, the Elite Swingsters propelling her into international stardom. Rathebe died this year on September 16.
Winston ‘Mankunku’ Ngozi
Born in Cape Town in 1943, the master saxophonist recorded his classic Yakhal’inkomo in 1968 and has been a major force in South African jazz ever since. His latest album, Abantwana baseAfrika, vindicates his greatness.
Dumile Feni
Painter and sculptor known as the ”Goya of the Townships”, Feni was born in Worcester in 1939. He worked as an apprentice at a sculpture foundry in Johannesburg and in 1965 received support from Gallery 101. Two years later his work was exhibited at the Sao Paulo Biennale. In 1968 he went into exile in the US where he died in 1991.
Olive Schreiner
Born in 1855 in Basutoland, Schreiner wrote her first novel, Story of an African Farm in 1883. Her 1897 novel Trooper Peter Halkett of Mashonaland was considered an attack on British imperialism and racism. Women and Labour, published in 1911, was an important feminist statement. She died in 1920.
Simon Tseko Nkoli
Nkoli was born in 1957 and died of an Aids-related illness in 1998, aged 41. A leading light in gay and Aids activism and an anti-apartheid leader, he was one of the accused in the Delmas Treason Trial. He founded Gays and Lesbians of the Witwatersrand, which staged South Africa’s first gay and lesbian pride march in 1990. Nkoli received the freedom of New York in 1996.
Ruth First
Journalist, academic and activist, First co-founded the Federation of Progressive Students and was secretary of the Young Communist League and the Johannesburg branch of the Communist Party of South Africa. In 1953 she helped found the Congress of Democrats, and was on the Freedom Charter drafting committee. Charged with treason in 1956, she fled to Swaziland in 1960. She was killed by a letter bomb in August 1982 in Maputo.
Ray Alexander
Born in Latvia, Alexander arrived in South Africa in 1929 and joined the SACP. Alexander helped form the Food and Canning Workers Union, but was forced to resign as general secretary after being banned in 1953. In 1954 she helped form the Federation of South African Women with Helen Joseph, Florence Mkhize and Lilian Ngoyi, and helped draft the Women’s Charter. She died in September this year.