Phillip Qipu Vundla

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. In December 1952 he was elected to the national executive committee of the African National Congress (ANC), but in May 1955 he was expelled in a controversy over the boycott of Bantu Education School. He subsequently joined the Moral Re-Armament movement and traveled abroad as an MRA speaker. A member of the Dube advisory board after the removal of Western Native Township, Vundla was elected to the Soweto Urban Bantu Council in 1968. He was instrumental in the founding of the Association for the Educational and Cultural Advancement of African People of South Africa (ASSECA). He died in 1969.