Born in 1935, he became a clerk and a journalist. In 1955 he was elected secretary of the Cape Town branch of the South African Coloured People's Organisation and in 1956 became one of the accused in the Treason Trial. After leaving South Africa, he joined the Pan Africanist Congress in exile and spent a period in China in the 1960s as a representative of the Afro-Asian Journalists' Association. After that he moved to Britain.