Dr Neville Alexander was born in Cradock on 22 October 1936, one of the six children of Dimbiti Bisho and David James Alexander. His father worked as a carpenter and his mother was a teacher. His family moved to Port Elizabeth, where he attended primary school until Standard Two in nearby Steytlerville. During this time, his father served in the South African army in North Africa. He was wounded in action, and became permanently disabled.

From 1945 to 1952, Alexander attended the Dominican Holy Rosary Convent, run by German-speaking nuns, in Cradock. At the convent, he became particularly interested in the German language, history, apologetics and scholastic philosophy.

Following his matriculation, he enrolled at the University of Cape Town, hoping to study medicine. However, he had not studied mathematics - a requirement for the course - he chose to train as a teacher instead. In 1955, Alexander graduated with a BA, majoring in History and German. He completed an MA in 1957, thereafter winning a scholarship to Tubingen University, West Germany. He studied there from October 1958 until July 1961, when he was awarded a DPhil in German literature.

Alexander was politically active while at the University of Cape Town.  In June 1953, during his first year, he joined the Teachers' League of South Africa, an affiliate of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) as a Student associate. He also joined a number of other NEUM organisations, including the Society of Young Africa, and participated in various educational fellowships in which aspects of South African and international politics were debated. He helped found the Cape Peninsula Students' Union, which became an influential organisation for educating radical political leadership.

Most of the activities in which Alexander was involved entailed protests, demonstrations at university and outside, public meetings, publication of Journals, study groups, films and drama. These aimed to create structures and organisations through which political leadership could be trained and developed.

Alexander's period in Germany was crucial to the development of his political ideology and attitudes. He joined the German Socialist Students' Union which was instrumental in the European Student revolts of the 1960s. He came into contact with the exiled Algerian students' movement and the Algerian trade union movement, which had its headquarters in Stuttgart, and met several Cubans. This combination of political influences and perspectives shaped his perceptions of South African politics, especially after Sharpeville, and he began considering the feasibility of guerrilla warfare and revolutionary movements in South Africa.

On his return to South Africa in July 1961, Alexander submitted his ideas on these matters to the NEUM. As a result, he and a close colleague, Kenneth Abrahams, were suspended from the movement. They subsequently formed the Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC), from the Chinese word meaning guerrilla warfare, thereafter founding the National Liberation Front (NLF) to bring together people willing to utilise violence to overthrow the State, irrespective of their political ideology. At the time, they also established ties with the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO).

Between 1961 and 1963, Alexander taught at Livingstone High School, but at the end of 1963, before the NLF could develop further, he and other members of the YCCC were detained, charged and convicted of conspiracy to commit Sabotage. In 1964, Alexander was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, which he served on Robben Island.

While in prison, Alexander obtained an Honours degree in history. He was also a member of the prisoners’ education committee on Robben Island and lectured to his fellow prisoners, helping them to improve their education and with their studies. Political prisoners on Robben Island formed a Teachers' Association.  Those who were the teachers, taught other prisoners. Alexander was appointed the chairperson of the Teachers' Association. Many Robben Island prisoners credit Alexander as the best history and language teacher they ever knew. Alexander was held in solitary confinement (as were many other prisoners), and he suffered a serious ear injury because of a beating administered by sadistic guards.

Alexander was elected the first Chairperson of a collective leadership structure, Ulundi that resulted from negotiations between prisoners of the different political organisations on Robben Island. Fikile Bam of the NEUM later replaced him. Ulundi’s objective was to mobilise prisoners into taking common action and discussing shared problems in order to confront the prison authorities.

 In 1965, IB Tabata established the Alexander Defence Committee (ADC), named after Neville Alexander, in New York, USA. The ADC was set up to provide funds for legal defence and family relief for political prisoners in South Africa. The organisation was ordered by the US Justice Department to register as an “agent of a foreign principal” under the provisions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938.  Another branch of the ADC was set up in German and was headed by a South African citizen Franz Lee who was its secretary. The ADC was also active in Canada and Europe where it organised speaker tours and raised funds for the families of political prisoners.

On his release in 1974, Alexander was banned and placed under house arrest. His banning orders expired at the end of April 1979. During this time, he worked in a supermarket and a doctor's surgery as a bookkeeper. He also undertook further research towards a book he had started writing while in prison. The final product, One Azania, One Nation, was published in 1979 under a pseudonym, but was banned in South Africa.

That same year Alexander began studying Namibian history and published a number of essays on the uprisings of 1904-07. He taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town in a part-time capacity and became active in the South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached), which appointed him as its Cape Town director in 1980. In 1985 a book of his speeches was published under the title, Sow the Wind.

In 1983, Alexander, through his involvement in the Cape Action League (CAL), became associated with the National Forum, formed to co-ordinate Opposition against the introduction of the tri-cameral Constitution. Alexander became a member of the National Forum Committee.

In 1986 Alexander became secretary of the Health Education and Welfare Society of South Africa, a Cape Town-based trust that facilitated funding for a range of Community projects. He also helped to co-ordinate the National Languages Project.  In 1989, a controversial new study by Alexander and the University of Cape Town's Institute for the Study of Public Policy argued that while English would emerge as the country's main means of communication in post-apartheid Society, South Africa would remain a multi-lingual society.

During this period, Alexander wrote two books, Language Policy and National Unity in South Africa/Azania (1989); and Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa (1990).

In April 1990, the Workers Organisation for Socialist Action (WOSA), headed by Alexander, was formed to promote working-class interests. Its basic principles, similar to those found in the Azanian Manifesto adopted by the National Forum in 1983, include black working-class leadership; anti-imperialism; anti-capitalism; anti-racism and a demand for one-person one-vote in a non-racial, unitary country.

Alexander is presently the Director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA), housed in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cape Town.

References

• Neville Alexander Profile, [online], from the University of the Free State, Available at humanities.ufs.ac.za [Accessed on 17 October 2011]
• Langston, R. (1966), The ADC Under Attack from the International Socialist Review, [online] Available at www.marxists.org [Accessed on 17 October 2011]
• SADET, (2008), The Road to Democracy: South Africans telling their stories. Vol. 1, 1950 – 1970. Hollywood: Tsehai Publishers, p 283
• SADET, (2004), The Road to Democracy in South Africans. Vol. 1, 1960 – 1970. Zebra Press, Paarl, pp 405-6,559
• O'Malley, P. (2002). 16 Oct 2002: Maharaj, Mac, [online], Available at www.nelsonmandela.org [Accessed on 17 October 2011]
• Barber, J., (1999). History of the Contemporary World, South Africa in the twentieth century, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp.167-168

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