CelebIsland has opened tribute pages for Robert Sobukwe, Ahmadu Bello, Herbert Macaulay, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Samora Machel. Each carries a short verified profile, a properly licensed picture where a free one exists, and a plain statement that the page is run by members and not by anyone's estate.

Why these five

The men and the woman below did not share a party, a country or a method. One founded Nigeria's first political party in a Lagos still run from London. One governed the Northern Region through the years around independence. One split from the African National Congress because he thought it had drifted. One was married into the most famous political household on the continent and built her own standing inside it. One took a nurse's training in a colonial hospital and came out of the bush as a head of state.

What they share is that their names are still argued over, and that the argument is worth having in public. CelebIsland is a Nigerian platform with an African audience, and these pages exist so that the argument happens somewhere the audience already is.

Robert Sobukwe, 1924 to 1978

Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was born on 5 December 1924 in Graaff-Reinet. He broke with the African National Congress over what he saw as non-African influence on its direction, and became the first president of the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959. On 21 March 1960 he led a non-violent protest against the pass laws, walking to Orlando police station to be arrested on purpose. The same day, police at Sharpeville killed 69 people.

Parliament later passed a clause allowing his sentence to be renewed year after year. He was the only person ever held under it, which is why it is still called the Sobukwe Clause. He spent 1963 to 1969 on Robben Island, much of it in solitary confinement, then lived under house arrest in Kimberley, qualified in law and opened a practice. He died there on 27 February 1978.

Ahmadu Bello, 1910 to 1966

Ahmadu Bello was born on 12 June 1910 in Rabah, in what is now Sokoto State. He held the title Sardauna of Sokoto and led the Northern People's Congress from 1949. From October 1954 until his death he was the first and only Premier of Northern Nigeria.

His record is a mixture that Nigerians still weigh differently depending on where they stand. He built schools across the region, founded the Northern Nigeria Development Corporation and the Bank of the North, and pushed a northernisation policy in the regional civil service that his critics have never stopped citing. He was killed in Kaduna on 15 January 1966 in Nigeria's first military coup, and the killings of that January fed directly into the crisis that became the civil war.

Herbert Macaulay, 1864 to 1946

Herbert Macaulay was born in Lagos on 14 November 1864 and trained in England as a land surveyor and civil engineer. He left colonial service for journalism and politics, and in 1923 he founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party, the first political party in the country.

In 1944 he became the first president of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, with Nnamdi Azikiwe as secretary. He died in Lagos on 7 May 1946. The phrase father of Nigerian nationalism gets used loosely, but in his case the paper trail supports it: the first party, the first sustained nationalist press, and the land rights cases he took as far as the Privy Council.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, 1936 to 2018

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was born on 26 September 1936 in Mbhongweni, Bizana, in what is now the Eastern Cape. She qualified as a social worker and worked at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. Married to Nelson Mandela from 1958 until their divorce in 1996, she spent the long years of his imprisonment as the most visible face of the struggle inside the country, and was banished to the small Free State town of Brandfort from 1977 to 1985.

She later led the ANC Women's League and sat in parliament. Her legacy is genuinely contested, including by people who fought alongside her, and a tribute page is not the place to pretend otherwise. She died in Johannesburg on 2 April 2018.

Samora Machel, 1933 to 1986

Samora Moises Machel was born on 29 September 1933 in Chilembene, Gaza Province, in what was then Portuguese Mozambique. He trained as a nurse in Lourenco Marques, now Maputo, and the racial pay gap he saw in the hospital was part of what pushed him towards the liberation movement.

He joined FRELIMO in 1963, took command of its guerrilla army, and became president of the movement in 1970 after the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane. On 25 June 1975 he became the first President of independent Mozambique. He died on 19 October 1986 when his aircraft came down at Mbuzini just inside South Africa, a crash that has never stopped generating questions.

How these pages are run

Every one of these pages is titled as a tribute and says on its face that it is unofficial, run by CelebIsland members, and not affiliated with, endorsed by or managed by the person named. No page claims to speak for an estate or a family.

Pictures follow the same rule. A page only gets a photograph when a genuinely free one exists on Wikimedia Commons under the public domain or a Creative Commons licence, and the credit and the licence are posted on the page itself. Four of these five now carry a picture. Robert Sobukwe does not, because the free images of him are group scenes rather than portraits, and a face that cannot be identified with confidence is worse than no face at all. If a properly licensed portrait surfaces, it goes up and it gets credited.

Members are welcome to add to any of these pages. Corrections are welcome too, and they will be made.

Written by Kelechi Orji (Kelly Hansome) for CelebIsland.