African National Congress organiser in the Western Cape. Ngotyana was born in the Transkei in 1922 and completed a few years of secondary schooling. He came to Cape Town as a labourer, worked as a garage attendant, and later helped organise a black railway and harbour workers' union of which he became secretary. Elected an official of the Western Cape ANC in 1951, he also acted as secretary of the Cape Western Advisory Boards and Vigilance Associations and was a key figure in the parliamentary campaigns of Brian Bunting, Ray Alexander, and Len Lee-Warden.
In 1953 he spent six months in Europe as a delegate to the World Youth Festival and a congress of the World Federation of Trade Unions. After his return to South Africa he was elected to the Cape provincial executive committee of the ANC and also became an important organiser for the Congress of the People. Banned from 1955, he was endorsed out of Cape Town after his release from the Treason Trial in late 1957 and was eventually restricted to the Tsomo area of the Transkei.