By Francis
Wilson, The Cape Times
With the
death this week of Neville Alexander South Africa has lost one of
it's greatest, and possibly least appreciated, sons. Political
thinker & activist; teacher & author; academic of renown and
genuine revolutionary Neville Alexander inspired generations of
people into action and yet spent most of his life apparently in the
political wilderness. Yet his work and his ideas will live on.
Born in
Cradock in 1936, son of a carpenter and a remarkable mother who was
the daughter of an Ethiopian Galla, or Oromo, slave who had been
rescued from an Arab dhow by the British---poachers turned
game-keepers---in 1888 and then sent with 63 others (many of whom
were young children and all under 18) to school at Lovedale in the
Eastern Cape. Many returned to Ethiopia but Neville's grandmother
stayed on to live in South Africa.
