Political Leaders Since 1935

Cultural Activists | Scientists & Inventors | Historic Speeches |

Joe Appiah

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Nnamdi Azikiwe

Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, popularly known as 'Zik', is the father of modern Nigerian nationalism and chief architect of the country's independence. The first Nigerian to be appointed Governor-General and later President of Republican Nigeria, Dr. Azikiwe was the founder of the National Convention Of Nigeria and the Cameroons (later changed to National Convention of Nigerian Citizens) - one of the ruling political parties in the country until the military take-over of January, 1966. >>>

Bantu Steve Biko

Steve Biko was one of the foremost figures in South Africa's struggle for liberation from the apartheid regime. Murdered by the police when he was only 30, he had already established himself as an important leader through his work as a political activist and his analysis on Black Consciousness. Biko, a South African political activist, believed and advocated that 'Black Liberation' started with “Black psychological self-reliance. As the founder and leader of the Black Conscious Movement, he promoted an ideology that attempted to change the way society operated, without racism." >>>

Amilcar Cabral

Amílcar Cabral, an agronomy engineer, was born in Guinea-Bissau in 1924. In 1954 he founded the Anti-colonialist Movement in Lisbon and two years later the PAIGC, becoming one of its main leaders. In September of 1960 the PAIGC organized a petition demanding from the Portuguese government the recognition of Guinea and Cabo Verde's people to self-determination. His assassination in Conakry in 1973 was perpetrated by the political police PIDE/DGS. >>>

Cheikh Anta Diop

Cheikh Anta Diop led throughout his life a pathetic struggle so that Africa might at long last get rid of the claws of cultural alienation which had lasted far too long, so that they would again become masters of a history which they had not lost before colonialism. Professor Cheikh Anta Diop bequeathed to Africa a heritage of liberation without precedence: the knowledge of one's origin. >>> [English: here]

William Edward Burghardt DuBois

W.E.B. Dubois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He was one of the most influential black leaders of the first half of the 20th Century in America. Dubois shared in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, in 1909. He served as its director of research and editor of its magazine, "Crisis," until 1934. >>>

Medgar Evers

Medgar Evers (1925-1963), field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was one of the first martyrs of the civil rights movement. His death prompted President John Kennedy to ask Congress for a comprehensive civil-rights bill, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the following year. >>>

Marcus Garvey

Garvey’s movement (UNIA) was the largest mass-movement of Black people ever assembled in the United States. This movement was ahead of all Black organizations of its day - and of ours - in the all-sided totality of cultural, political, economic, and spiritual liberation for Black people to which it aspired, and at least within its own ranks began to achieve. So great was this totality that Garveyism has been described a ‘a Black civic religion’. In addition, one of the movement’s greatest strengths was internationalism. The Garveyite movement saw that black people constituted a single planetary people who had been forcibly removed from their homeland, sold into slavery, and scattered into a ‘Black Diaspora’. >>>

Jomo Kenyatta

Kenyatta was born Kamau wa Ngengi in the village of Ichaweri in British East Africa (now Kenya). The year is uncertain: it may have been as early as 1889 or as late as 1895. He assisted his medicine man grandfather as a child after his parents' death. He went to school in the Scottish Mission Centre at Thogoto and was converted to Christianity in 1914 with the name John Peter, which he later changed to Johnstone Kamau. He moved to Nairobi. During the First World War he lived with Maasai relatives in Narok and worked as a clerk. >>>

Martin Luther King Jr.

The African American minister and Nobel Prize winner Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), originated the nonviolence strategy within the activist civil rights movement. He was one of the most important black leaders of his era. >>>

Patrice Lumumba

African nationalist leader, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (June-September 1960). Forced out of office during a political crisis, he was assassinated a short time later. >>>

Malcolm X

Original name Malcolm Little, Muslim name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, black militant leader who articulated concepts of race pride and black nationalism in the early 1960s. >>>

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Mandela was born in 1918. He earned (1942) a law degree from the Univ. of South Africa and was prominent in Johannesburg's youth wing of the African National Congress (ANC). In 1952 he became ANC deputy national president, advocating nonviolent resistance to apartheid. However, after a group of peaceful demonstrators were massacred (1960) in Sharpeville, Mandela organized a paramilitary branch of the ANC to carry out guerrilla warfare against the white government and was sentenced to life in prison. After his release in 1990, Mandela became the first democratically elected President of South Africa in 1994. >>>

Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki

On 16th June 1999, Thabo Mbeki became South Africa's second President of the Government of National Unity, replacing President Nelson Mandela. Thabo Mbeki is the son of African National Congress activist Govan Mbeki. He was born in Idutywa, Transkei, on 18 June 1942 and is one of four children. He became politically active at the age of 14 when he joined the Youth League. He studied A-levels and then went on to study economics by correspondence with London University. After his father's arrest and sentencing to life imprisonment at Rivonia in 1962, Thabo left the country under orders from the ANC. >>>

Elijah Muhammad

Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) was the leader of the Nation of Islam ("Black Muslims") during their period of greatest growth in the mid-20th century. He was a major advocate of independent, black-operated businesses, institutions, and religion. >>>

Huey P. Newton

Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) founded the Afro-American Society and was a co-founder of the Black Panther Party, serving as its minister of defense during much of the 1960s. Later he turned to community service for the poor. >>>

Kwame Nkrumah

Kwame Nkrumah is considered to be one of the father-figures of Pan-Africanism, liberating Ghana from British rule at the beginning of the 1960's at a time when most other African countries were under the overseas yolk. Nkrumah was a visionary, representing a view of Africa that others dared not dream about, espousing a United States of Africa, a model which other African leaders have since discussed, if not pursued. >>>

Julius Nyerere

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George Padmore

George Padmore was a very instrumental figure in Africa's struggle for independence eventhough he was a native of the West Indies(Trinidad). He had a very close relationship with Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast(later Ghana), mainly because they were both proponents of the Pan-Africanism movement. He also shared a similarly close relationship with Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya. >>>

Tovalu Quenem

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Léopold Sédar Senghor

Senegalese poet and statesman, founder of the Senegalese Democratic Bloc. Senghor was elected president of Senegal in the 1960s. He retired from office in 1980. He was one of the originators of the concept of Négritude, defined as the literary and artistic expression of the black African experience. In historical context the term has been seen as an ideological reaction against French colonialism and a defense of African culture. It has deeply influenced the strengthening of African identity in the French-speaking black world. >>>

Robert George (Bobby) Seale

Born to a poor African American carpenter and his wife in Dallas, Texas, on October 22, 1936, Robert George Seale (born 1936) was a militant activist who, with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Hutton, founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966. >>>

Walter Sisulu

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Oliver Tambo

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Henry Sylvester Williams

The Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams (1869-1911) organized the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. He traveled widely to promote pan-African solidarity. When he formed the African Association, as it was first called, one of its aims was to "promote and protect the interests of all subjects claiming African descent, wholly or in part, in British colonies and other places especially Africa, by circulating accurate information on all subjects affecting their rights and privileges as subjects of the British Empire, by direct appeals to the Imperial and local Governments." >>>

NN

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