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Biography

  • John Dube was born11 February in1871.
  • Died –on 11 February 1946) was a South African essayist, philosopher, educator, politician, publisher, editor, novelist and poet.
  • He was the founding president of the South African Native National Congress
  • Dube studied at Oberlin College (1888-1890) and later at the Union Missionary Training Institute in Brooklyn. 
  • After studying at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, U.S., and being ordained a minister, Dube returned to Natal with the goal of establishing a school for his fellow Africans similar to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute.

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educator

  • Dube was also an educator, a speaker of note on the circuit engaging whites in lectures around the country. In 1901 he and his first wife, Nokutela Dube, founded the Zulu Christian Industrial School which is now the Ohlange High School at Ohlange, near Phoenix and EkuPhakameni. This was the first educational institution in South Africa to be founded by black people.

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John Dube Life

  • Dube wanted Ohlange to prepare its pupils to be skilled laborers. When Dube founded Ohlange, any notion of a school for higher learning founded by an indigenous African for Africans was a new and truly revolutionary concept.
  • Later, as the school increased in size, the humanities and science curriculum continued to develop. However, some scholars argue that Dube and his fellow instructors feared the apartheid government would accuse the school of creating competition with educated whites as well as white skilled laborers.

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John Dube

In 1901, he founded the Inanda Seminary Institute for Girls at Ohlanga. He also wanted black people to go into business, so in 1903 he founded the isiZulu newspaper Ilanga. In 1930, John Dube published "Shaka's Body Servant." He also wrote about the lives of Zulu rulers, including King Dinizulu.

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John Dube City

  • Political involvement occupied much of the rest of his life, but he also found time to write a biography of the prophet Isaiah Shembe (U-Shembe) and Insila ka Shaka, his historical novel about Shaka, the great 19th-century chief who brought the Zulus to power. Dube received a Ph.D. from the University of South Africa in 1936