The former 1976 student movement leader became a voice for change and education.

Murphy Morobe's life reads almost like a personal reflection of South Africa's struggle to end apartheid and its subsequent reconstruction after 1992. I recently spoke with him about the impact on him personally.

Morobe explained that he began developing a political consciousness in earnest once he had transferred to Morris Isaacson High School for his final two years of secondary schooling.

The school's headmaster, LM Mathabathe, like its young science master, Fanyana Mazibuko, together with several other instructors, had wielded real influence over the students, helping to guide their political thinking in a school where ideas could be discussed - carefully, but well beyond the "Bantu Education" syllabus.

As Mazibuko described the school's ethos to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission years later: "Morris Isaacson was a highly disciplined school, almost military in its discipline. The other side of Morris Isaacson is that it was politically aware. In my arrival at Morris Isaacson, a number of things happened which indicated this. Examples of this political awareness and the leadership of the principal as a politically aware person is firstly the [Abram] Tiro case.

"In the Tiro case, the principal decided to employ a person who had been expelled from a university...