Moses Mbheki Mncane Mabhida was born in Thornville near Pietermaritzburg on 14 October 1923,he was  one of seven children in a rural family that was later forced off the land.Mabhida could not pursue his studies because of the financial constraints experienced by his family. His formal education was perpetually interrupted and ended when he finished the ninth grade in 1942.

Appiah Saravanan (A.S.) Chetty was born in Pietermaritzburg, Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) on 3 April 1929. He was the second of five children of Appiah and Vellimah Chetty, whose parents had been brought to Natal as indentured labourers. He attended Woodlands High where he was labelled an ‘agitator’ by the principal.

James Randolph Vigne was born in 1928 in Kimberley and grew up in Port-Elizabeth. He went to school at St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown where he enjoyed a spell as head boy at the age of 13 in 1941. That same year he joined the Van Riebeeck Society. He did his higher education at Wadham College, Oxford, after which he returned to Cape Town and served as English editor at Maskew Miller’s until 1964.

Denis Farrell’s aerial photograph in 1994 of a snaking queue of Soweto voters pipped that of Nelson Mandela casting his vote, earning him a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

Marcus Solomon was born in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, on 27 January 1939. His father, a waiter by profession, was a Hindu born of Tamil parents from Sri Lanka, although his paternal grandfather was Christian. His mother, classified Coloured, was of mixed Scottish and Khoi descent and belonged to the Protestant Congregational Church.

Professor Sir Raymond (Bill) Hoffenberg was born in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Province (now Eastern Cape) on 16 March 1923. He went to school in Port Elizabeth and excelled at sport. Later in life, he excelled at squash and golf.

Stanley Basil  Lollan was born in Johannesburg in 1925, he became one of the few significant coloured activists in the Transvaal in the 1950s. A clerk by occupation, he was secretary of the South African Coloured People's Organisation in the Transvaal in the mid-1950s and was a defendant in the Treason Trial for its full length, from 1956 to 1961. He moved to Swaziland after 1961.He worked  as a clerk at the Industrial Council for the Clothing Industry.

Struggle veteran Amos Ndwalane, who escaped the noose by seven days due to the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1990, was allowed out of his hospital bed for two hours on Friday (3 May 2019) so that former president Jacob Zuma could hand over a new house in Lamontville, Durban, to him.  

Adrian Leftwich grew up in Cape Town, Western Province (now Western Cape), in 1940 in a liberal Jewish family. His father was a doctor, and his mother gave piano lessons and carried out charitable works.

Leftwich obtained his BA Honours degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT), Western Province (now Western Cape), South Africa and his PhD degree from the University of York, United Kingdom. He taught at the Universities of Cape Town, York, Lancaster and Reading in the United Kingdom (UK).