Neville Edward Alexander OLS (22 October 1936 – 27 August 2012) was a proponent of a multilingual South Africa and a former revolutionary who spent ten years on Robben Island as a fellow-prisoner of Nelson Mandela.

Having been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship place at the University of Tübingen[4] he gained his PhD in 1961 for a dissertation on style change in the dramatic work of Gerhart Hauptmann.

[5] By 1957, Alexander was already radicalised and a member of the Cape Peninsula Students' Union, an affiliate of The Non-European Unity Movement of South Africa.

However he was ejected from APDUSA in 1961 and with Dulcie September, Ottilie Abrahams, and Andreas Shipinga, among others, formed a study group of nine members in July 1962, known as the Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC); Yu Chi Chan is the Chinese name for guerrilla warfare, which Mao Zedong used.

The citation noted that he had devoted more than twenty years of his professional life to defend and preserve multilingualism in the post-apartheid South Africa and had become one of the major advocates of linguistic diversity.