Arndt, the youngest son of Reverend Johannes Arndt and Luise Pauline Grutzner was born in Bloemfontein on 27 May 1899. He started his education at the Infants’ School and the Normal Practising School in Bloemfontein, progressing to Grey College, where he matriculated. 

S. J. J. Lesolang was born and educated in the Transvaal, he taught at Kilnerton during the 1940s and was president of the Transvaal African Teachers' Association during the wartime protests over teachers' salaries. He was a founding member of the African Democratic Party and a member of the South African Institute of Race Relations. Later he became a Johannesburg businessman and was active in the African Chamber of Commerce and in the politics of Bophuthatswana, the Tswana "homeland."

Manasseh Tebatso Moerane was born in 1913 to an educated Sotho parents in the Transkei, he attended Adams College and obtained bachelor's degrees from Fort Hare and the University of Natal and a B.Com. degree from the University of South Africa. On graduation from Fort Hare, he took up teaching in Natal in 1935 and the same year joined the African National Congress (ANC), of which his father had also been a member.

Ray E. Phillips was born in 1889 and active in South Africa for four decades following World War I. He participated in the Joint Council movement and was a founder of the South African Institute of Race Relations. Long associated with the programs of the Bantu Men's Social Centre in Johannesburg, he was also the principal of the J. H. Hofmeyr School of Social Work for Africans.

Philip Vundla was born in 1901 and attended Healdtown for some years before finding work in Johannesburg as a mine clerk. In the mid-1940s he was an organiser for the African Mineworkers' Union and also served on the National Anti-Pass Council in 1944. He was best known as a member of the Western Native Township advisory board and one of the principal organisers of resistance to the government's Western Areas removal scheme in the mid-1950s.

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Chief of the Mbuto (Mbuthweni) section of the Hlubi group of tribes, was the son of Fuba III and the grandson of Zibi II. He was educated at Love dale Institution at Alice in the Eastern Cape which he later joined as teacher, choir conductor and interpreter. He remained there for fourteen years. In 1912 he conducted the Lovedale and St Matthew's College Male Voice Choir at the first Missionary Conference in Cape Town.

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.