• IT was a pleasure to see Neville Alexander quoted, (How to help the protesters, January 26).

There can be few South Africans who participated in the fight against apartheid who have a more extraordinary history.

Alexander was brought up in the small town of Cradock, where he was educated by German nuns. He was bright and went on to the University of Cape Town, studying to go into teaching.

Alexander joined the Non-European Unity Movement, where he came to know the works of Marx and Trotsky, before going on to study in Germany at the University of Tübingen, where he obtained an MA and PhD.

Returning to South Africa after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, Alexander decided that only armed resistance would end apartheid and co-founded the National Liberation Front.

Infiltrated by the state, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit sabotage and imprisoned on the notorious Robben Island from 1964 to 1974, serving his time with Nelson Mandela.

On his release he was held under house arrest and joined the Black Consciousness Movement, finally being allowed to take up at teaching post in sociology at the University of Cape Town.

Alexander worked as an educationalist, a field in which he continued to be a leading activist until his death in 2012.

If Neville Alexander had an extraordinary background, his grandmother’s was at least as remarkable. Bisho Jara was among a group of 183 Ethiopian slaves freed by a British warship in 1888 who intercepted an Arab slave dhow off Yemen. They were first taken to Aden and then, when they failed to thrive, placed in the care of missionaries at Lovedale in South Africa.

“We were overawed in her presence and by the way she would mumble to herself in this language none of us understood,” recalled her grandson. This was Ethiopia’s Oromo language, Bisho’s mother tongue, which she reverted to as she grew older. Bisho was trained for domestic service, but went on to become one of only two of the Oromo girls who trained as a teacher.

In 1902 she left Lovedale and found a position at a school in Cradock. Then in 1911 she married Frederick Scheepers, a minister in the church. Under the apartheid system their children were classified as Coloured, or mixed-race, rather than African. Alexander was born in Cradock, to David James Alexander, a carpenter, and Dimbiti Bisho, a schoolteacher.

And hence began the journey that would lead Neville Alexander to become a liberation fighter and a leading educationist.

MARTIN PLAUT, NW5