Ray (or Taube, her Yiddish name) Harmel was born in Lithuania in 1905.  Strongly influenced by some of her six brothers, she joined the-then illegal Lithuanian Communist Party.  She eventually had to flee the political police and escaped, via Germany where she was detained for six months for illegal entry into that country.  In 1928, Ray arrived in South Africa, with little formal education and no English, although she was fluent in Yiddish, German, Lithuanian and Russian.  The only skill she had acquired was at the sewing machine, and so her life as a seamstress be

Mr GK Gokhale was the Founder of the Servants of India Society in Poona. On Ghandi's invitiation, he Toured South Africa in October of 1912. He was associated with Deccan Education Society's Fergusson College as Professor of Mathematics, English, Political Economy. In 1899 he was elected to the Bombay Legislative Council and presided over the Indian National Congress Session in Benaras. He championed the cause of South African Indentured Indians.

Raymond Dart was born on 4 February 1893 in Toowong, Brisbane, Australia. He attended university in Queensland and Sydney. In 1920, Dart pursued further study at the University of London, under the anatomists Grafton Elliot Smith and Arthur Keith. When a Anatomy Professorship became available at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Elliot Smith encouraged Dart to apply for the position, which he was subsequently offered. Dart moved to South Africa in 1922 and later made enormous contributions globally to the fields of physical anthropology and paleontology.

Alan Cormack, the youngest of three children, was born in Johannesburg in February 1924. His father was an engineer with the Post Office and his mother a teacher. His parents moved to South Africa from the north of Scotland shortly before the outbreak of World War One.

J. M. Coetzee was born to German and English parents in Cape Town on 9 February 1940. Coetzee spent his childhood in there, as well as in Worcester, a picturesque Western Cape town northeast of the famous South African harbour city. Supporters of the liberal South African party of General Jan Smuts, his parents opposed the conservative Afrikaner nationalists who ultimately came to power in South Africa in 1948, beginning a racist and oppressive apartheid regime.

Born in 1900, Johannesburg Chamile worked as a labourer. He was a member of the Newclare branch of African National Congress which he joined during the Defiance Campaign. The indictment against him in the Treason Trial was squashed in 1959.

Odd one out

Over the years many people have asked me how it came about that I, amongst all the Afrikaners that I grew up with or knew, as a young man in the 1960s and early 1970s, came to an alternative view about racism and Apartheid and took an active role in opposing the South African government of the time.