Jordan Kush Ngubane

It was April 1944, in South Africa, at the Bantu Men's Social Centre.

Young African activists were founding the Congress Youth League there. They needed a text to say who they were. A manifesto.

One of its authors was named Jordan Kush Ngubane. He was twenty-six. He was a journalist.

A fellow activist, A. P. Mda, would say the manifesto had "Ngubane written all over it."

He was born on November 15, 1917, in Nkwebebe, a village near Ladysmith, in Natal. His father was a policeman.

In 1933, he entered Adams College, near Durban. There he became friends with Anton Lembede. Eleven years later, the two friends would write the manifesto together.

He graduated in 1937 and became assistant editor at Ilanga lase Natal, John L. Dube's newspaper.

He wrote a satirical column there, "Gleanings from Life." He signed it "Jo the Cow." From 1938 to 1943, he published more than 376 articles in it.

In 1943, he left for Johannesburg. At the Bantu World, he wrote about world affairs.

At the end of 1944, he took charge of Inkundla ya Bantu, a newspaper published in Verulam, near Durban. He ran it until 1951.

There he sometimes signed as Khanyisa, sometimes as Twana.

He called himself an African nationalist and a liberal. He stood for a non-racial society, built on each person's freedom.

In the mid-1950s, he left the ANC and joined the Liberal Party, becoming its vice-president.

In 1957, he published a novel in Zulu, Uvalo Lwezinhlonzi. The book would be banned in South Africa from 1962 to 1967.

In December 1958, he was a delegate in Accra, Ghana, at the All-African People's Conference.

He was prosecuted under the Suppression of Communism Act.

In 1962, he left the country with his family for Swaziland. There, he farmed the land. And he kept on writing.

In 1963 came An African Explains Apartheid. The apartheid government banned the book.

According to the Mail & Guardian, Ngubane was the first to popularize the idea of ubuntu in South Africa, and to try to think it through in his writings.

Ubuntu says that a person becomes a person through other people.

In 1969, a Ford Foundation grant took him to the United States. He taught at Howard University, in Washington.

In the spring of 1980, he returned to the Zulu homeland as minister of information.

He died on September 17, 1985, at the age of 67.

His name has faded a little from the history books.

But at the beginning, there was also a man holding the pen. He wrote columns, manifestos, banned books.

And, among all those words, an old word that he made known: ubuntu.