Jacob Morake was born on 8 December 1955, and grew up in Central Western Jabavu in Soweto near Johannesburg. He was 10 years old when, one bitterly cold night, his mother told him to put more coal in the stove. Disobeying her was not an option but going out into the freezing wind was not a pleasant prospect. So he picked up a can of paraffin in the kitchen and tipped it over the coals in the stove. The explosion turned the youngster into a torch, causing life-threatening burns from just under his right ear down to his chest and his right arm.

Letlapa Ngoato Mphahlele was born on 8 December 1960 in Rosenkrantz, Northern Transvaal (now Limpopo) to Radikubu and Nkone. He grew up in the village of Manaleng in Northern Transvaal.

Wolfie Kodesh was born in Benoni on 18 October 1918. His paternal grandparents arrived in South Africa after fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe. His mother, Fanny Shapiro, came from East End in London. Kodesh’s father ran a hansom cab business which collapsed during the great depression of the 1930s. After his parents separated, Wolfie, his twin sister and brother moved to Cape Town where they joined their mother. His family was relatively poor, and his mother opened a shop in the Woodstock slum, an area where the family lived.

Lydia (nee Ngwenya) Kompe was born in 1935 in Matlala, near Pietersburg in the Northern Transvaal (now Limpopo Province). Her father was a small-scale farmer who kept livestock. However, in 1950 when the government introduced the betterment scheme everything the family had was taken away. As a result Kompe had to drop out of school and leave her family and move to Johannesburg to work.

Audrey Coleman was born in 1933. When she was twenty years old she married businessman Max Coleman. They had four sons, and became active members of the Detainees Parents Support Committee (DPSC) when their sons were arrested and detained. Coleman became an informal ambassador for the organization, travelling all over the world publicizing detention issues, and particularly, the detention of children.

Kabelo Sello Duiker was born in Orlando West, Soweto, Johannesburg. Duiker was the eldest of three brothers and his parents were well-educated and affluent. His father is the former soccer player Judah Duiker. He was sent to the elite Redhill School, where he was one of only two Black children in the entire school. Having been born at the height of Apartheid, Duiker became very conscious of the political climate of the country he lived in.

Justice of the South African Constitutional Court 1994 -

João Albasini was born in Lisbon, Portugal on 1 June 1813. Beside the fact that his father was a sea captain, little is known about young Albasini’s youth. In 1831, when João was 18, his father left him in charge of a trading post at Delagoa Bay (In present day Mozambique). It was here that the Tsonga people nurtured his hunting skills. After learning on buck he soon became a skilled elephant hunter and traded ivory with interior peoples.

The biography below is from a tribute to Badela written by Prof Guy Berger, the head of the department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University (2002).

"Mono Badela - South African journalistic legend"

Amy Biehl was born on 26 April 1967 to a Roman Catholic family in Newport Beach, California, in the United States of America (USA). She excelled academically and graduated as valedictorian from Sante Fe High School. She went on to study at Stanford University, where she had graduated with honours.