Born in the black ghetto of Sophiatown to a Xhosa family, he experienced the harsh realities of oppression and discrimination in his homeland when the entire township was destroyed in 1952 in an apartheid cleansing of the area.

He later used this and many other experiences to excel at Lesotho University where he earned a degree in theology, but later returned home to complete studies in journalism.

He was returning to the United States after he was initially nominated as South Africa's Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in September 1975.

He failed to see the end of his life's work having died in 1988 on his 50th birthday, after suffering a heart attack on Christmas Day in 1987 and slipping into a coma.

According to their website, the prize is "[a]warded to a foreign journalist who has done extraordinary work while overcoming tremendous obstacles that contributes to the enrichment, understanding or advancement of people or issues in the African diaspora.