Abram Onkgopotse Tiro

Who is Abram Onkgopotse Tiro?

Abram Onkgopotse Tiro was a South African student activist and black consciousness militant murdered by the apartheid state.

He was born in Dinokana, a small village near Zeerust. He was expelled from the University of the North in 1972 for his political activists and he became involved in the Black Consciousness Movement in 1973. After his expulsion from the then University of the North, in 1972, following his scathing critique of the Bantu Education Act on 1953, he went on to teach at Morris Isaacson High School near and around Central Western Jabavu in Soweto. This same school attended by Tsietsi Mashinini, who was an integral part of the 1976 student uprising. It is possible that, in some way, it was at Morris Isaacson that where Tiro introduced the philosophy of the Black Consciousness Movement to the students and thereby, starting a campaign to encourage students to question Bantu Education.

He was killed by a parcel bomb in Botswana in 1974.