Steve Bantu Biko, a spouse to Ntsiki Mashalaba was born in December 1946 in King William’s town in South Africa. He was a son of Mathew who was occupied in the police force and Alice who worked as a domestic servant at a hospital in the town. He was an Anti-apartheid activist in the country between the year 1960 and the year 1970. At the University, he was the student leader that later spearheaded the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement. It is this movement that endeavored to empower as well as mobilize much of the urban black populace in the country.
Queen Nanny or simply Nanny is a popular leader of the Jamaican Maroons in the 18th century. She was of the Ghanaian origin born in the year 1686. She was brought to Jamaica as a slave. She was a Jamaican National Hero with the historical pamphlets referring her as the rebel’s old woman. The Maroons were Jamaican slaves that were rebellious and disobedient escaping from the plantations to form their own villages. She freed many slaves helping them resettle. The Nanny Town is said to have come up as a result of the place that she had put up alongside other slaves.
Patrice Emery Lumumba was a Congolese independence leader and later the first democratically voted Prime Minister of the Congo Republic. This was in the year 1960 after the country got its freedom from their colonizers the Belgium’s. A spouse to Pauline Lumumba, he was born in the year 1925 and was assassinated in the 1961 after a coup. His assassination is alleged to have been done by the Katangan authorities with the help of the Belgium’s and the United States. This came to be the truth after the Belgian government officially apologized on the matter in the year 2002.
With the Hasselblad Award under his belt, Malick Sidibe was born in the year 1936 in a place named Soloba in Mali. He was a photographer by profession and was recognized through his black and white prevalent studies of culture. This was after he had done and complited his studies in design and jewelry in the Ecole de Artisans in Bomako. It is in the 1958 when he started his own studio specializing in documentary photography that he becomes famous. This was culminated with his photos being exhibited in Europe, United States, Japan, and many other countries.
Born in the year 1969 in Stockton California, Kara Walker has MacArthur Fellowship Award under her belt. She is a modern-day African-American artist who reconnoiters race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity through her workings. She is very commonly known for her room-size tableaux of black cut paper silhouettes. This talent it is noted that she got and developed it from his dad from a tender age. It is in the year 1994 when she first got into the world’s attention thanks to her mural Gone. This was an historical romance of a civil war as it had taken place.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, born in 1960 in Brooklyn was a son to Matilda Andrades and Gerard Basquiat. He was an artist who started as a graffiti artist but raised and evolved into a much-admired Neo-expressionist and Primitivism painter in the year 1980’s. Through his paintings, he is accredited for raising his voice against the systems of racism. This is due to the fact that his poets were highly political and directly criticized colonialism.
Paul Gilroy was born in 1956 and rose to become a professor at the King’s College London. He himself was educated at the University College School and went ahead to get a PhD. He is a Scholar of Cultural Studies as well as Black Atlantic diaspora culture. He is the writer of There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack, Small Acts, The Black Atlantic, Between Camps, and also After Empire and many others. He is as well known for laying the path for scholar and historian of the music of the Black Atlantic Diaspora.
Gloria Jean Watkins also known as bell hooks was born in the year 1952. She took her nom de plume from her maternal great grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. She is an American author, feminist as well as a social worker where she majored mainly on the interconnectivity of race, capitalism, and gender. It is through this ability that she was able to produce and disseminate systems of subjugation and class domination. This has led to produce and publish several books and articles used even in lectures.
Until his recent death, Chinua Achebe held the record of being the top African writer in his times. He was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in the year 1930 in Nigeria. He rose to become a novelist, poet, professor, and detractor. He is well known through his book Things Fall Apart all over the world. Before his writings, he had been excellent in school where he won a scholarship for his undergraduate. It is there that he developed the passion for world religions and the traditional African cultures. At that point, his writings journey started while still a student leader.
Aime Fernand David Cesaire is a French poet and politician who was born in the year 1913. He is one of the founders of the negritude movement in the Francophone literature. During his schooling at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand on a scholarship, he started his writing on poems. After getting married, they relocated Martinique where he became a teacher. It at this period also that he served as a motivator for Edouard Glissant. He equally became a heavy influencer for Fanon as a mentor and a contemporary.
