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Josias Ratshilumela Madzunya

Josias Ratshilumela Madzunya Image source

Synopsis
Political Activist, Chair of the ANC in Alexandra, later joined the PAC
First name
Josias
Middle name
Ratshilumela
Last name
Madzunya
Date of birth
1909
Location of birth
Sibasa area, Northern Transvaal (now Limpopo Province)
Gender
Male

Josias Ratshilumela Madzunya was born in the Sibasa area of the northern Transvaal in about 1909, a member of the Venda tribe,the son of a polygamous Venda-speaking peasant farmer near Thohoyandou in the northern Transvaal,Madzunya came to Johannesburg in 1931, eventually establishing himself as a peddler. He joined a night school to earn a Standard 7 certificate, and sought to educate himself politically by attending Communist Party meetings.In 1947 he became a  member of the African National Congress(ANC).

In 1951 he allied himself with Selope Thema's National-minded Bloc in opposition to left-wing and interracial trends in the  ANC. He thereafter became chairman of an Alexandra branch of the ANC and played a leading role in the Alexandra bus boycott of 1957. The press seized on the flamboyant Madzunya and portrayed him as a leading Africanist. The Africanists declined at first to accept him, then later decided to run him for the Transvaal Congress presidency in 1958 on a platform of opposition to the Congress alliance. He lost and also failed to win a seat on the executive committee of the Pan Africanist Congress when it was formed in April 1959. Following the Sharpeville emergency he served an 18-month sentence for incitement; on his release in 1962 he was endorsed out of Johannesburg.He returned  with his family to Sibasa where he found work with a bus company.

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