Tamsanqa Tasque Tshume

Stalwart of the Cape African National Congress in the 1950s. He was born in 1925 in Port Elizabeth, and inherited the political inclinations of his two uncles, Gladstone and Ben, both of whom were ANC leaders in the Eastern Cape. Employed as factory worker and as a clerk, he joined the Youth League in New Brighton location in Port Elizabeth and in the mid-1950s he became a member of the league's national executive and its president in the Cape, after the banishment of A.S. Gwentshe. During the 1952 Defiance Campaign he was jailed for civil disobedience. As a secretary of powerful ANC branch in New Brighton, he played an active part in organizing for the 1955 Congress of the people. He later became secretary of Cape ANC and a member of the ANC national executive committee, position he held at the time of the treason arrests in December 1956. A defendant throughout the full length of the Treason Trial, he moved Basutoland at the end of the trial in 1961 but later returned to South Africa.