Simon Nkoli

Tseko Simon Nkoli was born in Soweto and spent part of his childhood on white-owned farms in the Orange Free State, where his family worked as labour tenants. Back in the Vaal townships as a teenager he joined the Congress of South African Students and became a well-known youth organiser. He also joined the Gay Association of South Africa, an overwhelmingly white group that would later fail to support him when he needed it.

In 1984 he was arrested after rent protests in Sebokeng and charged, with 21 others, with treason. The Delmas trial dragged on for four years. In prison he told his co-accused that he was gay. Some argued that his presence would damage the case; others, including the future premier Terror Lekota, defended him, and the group came round. He was acquitted in 1988, and later said that the years in a cell had settled the question of whether he could be both a freedom fighter and a gay man.

He founded the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand in 1988 and organised the country's first Pride march in Johannesburg in 1990. Because he came with anti-apartheid credentials that no one could question, the ANC listened when he argued that a free South Africa should not discriminate on sexual orientation. In 1996 it became the first constitution in the world to say so.

He was one of the first South Africans to speak publicly about living with HIV, and he died of AIDS-related illness in 1998, aged 41.