This chapter assesses the life and times of Pixley Seme, one of the founding members of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) in 1912 and its president-general between 1930 and 1936. The chapter also examines Seme’s efforts to fight racial injustice in neighbouring Swaziland.

This chapter examines the Pan-Africanism of South African scholar-activist, Ruth First, through her intellectual work on Namibia and an analysis of military coups d’état in Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, and Ghana, as well as her activism in Mozambique.

This chapter assesses the work of another pioneering woman feminist, Senegal’s Mariama Bâ, through her two major novels which call for the development of a liberated, egalitarian, and progressive African society, free of patriarchy.

This chapter examines the African-American intellectual’s contributions to the movement, especially between 1919 and 1945 when he played a leading role in the five Pan-African Congresses in Paris, London, New York, and Manchester, before moving to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana to spend the last years of his life.

Biography, globally, ranges from weighty tomes on political lives to hastily written and speedily published money-spinners that capitalise on the fleeting fame of celebrities and sports stars. While South Africa is no exception, its biographies also reflect the country’s wider political and intellectual landscape. It is a genre that is often beholden to grand political narratives, but it can also be a reflection of critical historiographical trends, or a tool to excavate marginalised lives. This chapter reflects on the tension between biography as an academic pursuit and biography as a political barometer. In particular, it highlights three strands. It examines biography as grand narrative, and the shift from Afrikaner nationalist biography to postapartheid biography, which sought to create a new pantheon of liberation and antiapartheid heroes. It engages with the fairly recent turn to biographies of perpetrators, and the wounds this opens up in a society where the apartheid past is still very much alive. And it points to the implications of this development: biography as public discourse and a driver of ideas, wherein biographies of complicated and complicit subjects can challenge the aforementioned grand narratives – or serve to create new ones. This chapter is not an attempt at an exhaustive survey of South African biography, but instead highlights significant works reflecting the trends that have been described. This implies a strong political focus. In addition, the discussion is not limited to scholarly works of biography, but includes popular and polemic works whose significance lies in their impact.

This chapter examines the work and activism of Nigerian Nobel literature laureate, Wole Soyinka. Osha views the Nobel laureate as an innovator and Bard of the Yoruba god of creativity, Ogun.

This chapter assesses Martinique’s Aimé Césaire and Senegal’s Léopold Senghor development of the idea of négritude which glorified black culture, looking back nostalgically at a rich African past, and affirming the worth and dignity of black people across the globe.

This chapter assesses the work and activism of Kenyan writer, Micere Mugo, who promoted curriculum transformation at the University of Nairobi before living in political exile in Zimbabwe and the US.

This chapter examines the contributions of Amy Ashwood Garvey – the wife of Marcus Garvey – to the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities Imperial League; her feminist activism; and her travels to Africa and the Caribbean.

This chapter assesses the thinking of Kenyan political scientist, Ali Mazrui, focusing particularly on his idea of “The Triple Heritage” (Africa’s indigenous, Western, and Islamic legacies) and the post-colonial “African Condition” in a perpetual quest for a self-generated development and security paradigm.