Jameson Gilbert Coka was born in 1910 on a white farm near Vryheid, Natal, the son of a sharecropper. He won a bursary to Adams College, where he completed his schooling to junior certificate level. Attracted by the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union(ICU), he left school to join it in 1927, becoming a local ICU leader in Vryheid. But Kadalie's star was on the wane, and Coka was soon disillusioned by the ICU's weaknesses. In the Communist Party he found a more congenial political home, and in the party organ,Umsebenzi, he found an outlet for his gifts as a writer. In mid-1935, however, he was expelled from the CPSA for alleged reformist tendencies. For a brief period he worked on Pixley Seme'snewspaper, Ikwezi. When it folded, he made an attempt to support himself through free-lance journalism but found white pressmen hostile to his nationalistic ideas. In 1935 he launched his own newspaper, the short-lived African Liberator. In 1946 he was among 17 members of the African National Congress (ANC) indicted in connection with the strike of African mineworkers. He died in the 1960s.

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