Aubrey Mokoape

Dr. Maitshwe Nchuape Aubrey Mokoape (6 September 1944 – 26 December 2020) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and a leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress and Black Consciousness Movement. He was first arrested and detained at the age of 15. He studied and worked alongside political anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. In post-apartheid South Africa, Mokoape became a physician.

Early life and education Aubrey Mokoape was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he grew up as a child but later moved to Pretoria with his family. Aubrey and his family lived in a Johannesburg location in a building that only workers lived in. Mokoape was released from prison and pursued a career in becoming a doctor and studied at the University of Natal where he met Steve Bantu Biko. Both Biko and Mokoape were prominent leaders of the Black consciousness Movement and key members of the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) and Black People's Convention (BPC). The BCM emerged during the banning of the ANC and PAC after the Sharpeville massacre. On top of building schools and day care centres and taking part in other social projects, the BCM through the BCP was involved in the staging of the large scale protests and workers strikes which gripped the nation in 1972 and 1973, especially in Durban. Indeed, in 1973 the government of South Africa began to clamp down on the movement, claiming that their ideas of black development were treasonous, and virtually the entire leadership of SASO and BPC were banned Black Consciousness Movement. Mokoape was one of the members restricted to Durban. He was known as the founder member of the BPC and a medical doctor at the King Edward VII Hospital in Durban. At the time of his banning; he was charged under the Terrorism Act, in the Pretoria Supreme Court at the so-called Palace of Justice he was detained in September 1974 and sentenced in December 1976 to 6 years imprisonment, in a trial of nine SASO and BPC members.