West Street has to be one of Durban’s most famous roads, running right through the centre of the CBD. The road was renamed in 2007 in honour of South Africa’s first black lawyer, Dr Pixley KaSeme. Nephew of John Dube, KaSeme moved to America to study at Columbia University, and later moved to England to read law at Oxford University. In 1911 KaSeme returned to South Africa and was instrumental in arranging the first meeting of the South African Native National Congress (renamed the African National Congress), an organisation which he later became the President General of. Wikipedia compares KaSeme’s nationalist organising of Africans to the efforts of Mahatma Gandhi.
Dr Pixley KaSeme died in 1951.
Click here to read SA History Online’s biography on this great South African pioneer.
Photograph courtesy of wikipedia.org.