There have been South African Nobel Laureates in four out of the six categories under which Nobel Prizes are awarded annually. In all, ten South Africans have been conferred this prestigious award.
The Nobel Peace Prize
Awarded for humanitarian work and human rights advocacy, mediation in conflicts and disarmament, the Nobel Peace Prize for has been awarded to four South Africans.
Albert L
utuli (1960): was President General of the African National Congress and led millions of his fellow black Africans in their non-violent struggle for civil rights in Africa. While adamant in his demand for equality, he was intolerant of hatred.
Desmond Tutu (1984): was awarded the Nobel for his untiring work against apartheid, calling for ending minority rule in South Africa, legalising liberation organisations and releasing political prisoners. He was chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard testimonials of victims of the apartheid regime.
Nelson Mandela and F W de Klerk (1993): shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in the peaceful end of apartheid, and in crafting a democratic South Africa.
Nelson Mandela had been sentenced to life in prison for plotting to overthrow the regime, and was incarcerated from 1964 to 1990. He became the first democratically elected president of South Africa in 1994.
De Klerk was the President of South Africa between 1989 and 1994, and was instrumental in releasing Nelson Mandela from prison, legalising the banned African National Congress, and dismantling the Pretoria Regime.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Max Theiler (1951): was granted the Nobel for his work on understanding and combating yellow fever. He developed the 17D, a vaccine that could be mass produced and administered to millions of people around the world.
Alan M Cormack (1979): received the award for his theories on computer assisted tomography which led to the development of the first CAT scan machine in 1972.
Sydney Brenner (2002): was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death.
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Nadine Gordimer (1991): wrote vivid accounts of racial conflict and the pain inflicted by the unjust apartheid regime. Her books were banned by the regime, but read widely around the world.
J M Coetzee (2003): comes from a family that opposed the conservative nationalists who were behind the oppressive Pretoria Regime. He has also won the Booker Prize twice.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Aaron Klug (1982): was awarded the Nobel for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.
