Top 10 African Martyrs and Freedom Heroes They Don't Teach

Summary

Maji Maji prophet Kinjikitile Ngwale was hanged on 4 August 1905. Between 75,000 and 300,000 people died in the war that followed, mostly from famine (Wikipedia, "Maji Maji Rebellion," citing Iliffe)
Omar Mukhtar was hanged at 73 at the Soluch concentration camp in Libya on 16 September 1931. The camp's recorded population was 20,123 (Wikipedia, "Soluch concentration camp")
France claimed for decades that Larbi Ben M'hidi took his own life in custody in 1957. On 1 November 2024, President Macron acknowledged he was killed by French soldiers (The Local / AFP)
Mentioning Ruben Um Nyobè's name was banned in Cameroon until the 1990s. In a letter signed on 30 July 2025, Macron acknowledged France's responsibility for his death (Wikipedia; TimesLIVE / Reuters)

#	Name	Country	Fought Against	Died	How They Died	Recognition Since
1	Kimpa Vita	Kongo (Angola)	Portuguese influence, Kongo civil war	2 July 1706	Burned at the stake	Statue in Angola; Antonian legacy
2	Kinjikitile Ngwale	Tanzania	German colonial rule	4 August 1905	Hanged	1969 play Kinjeketile
3	Koitalel Arap Samoei	Kenya	British railway and rule	19 October 1905	Shot at a truce meeting	Mausoleum; head still not returned
4	Hendrik Witbooi	Namibia	German colonial rule	29 October 1905	Killed in battle	Bible and whip returned, 2019
5	Omar Mukhtar	Libya	Italian colonial rule	16 September 1931	Hanged	National icon
6	Abune Petros	Ethiopia	Italian occupation	29/30 July 1936	Firing squad	Statue in Addis Ababa; Orthodox saint
7	Larbi Ben M'hidi	Algeria	French colonial rule	4 March 1957	Hanged in custody	France admitted killing, 2024
8	Ruben Um Nyobè	Cameroon	French colonial rule	13 September 1958	Shot by French army	France admitted responsibility, 2025
9	Sylvanus Olympio	Togo	Military coup	13 January 1963	Shot at the US embassy gate	Remembered as Togo's founding president
10	Solomon Mahlangu	South Africa	Apartheid	6 April 1979	Hanged	Reburied 1993; Order of Mendi, 2005

This list is ordered by date of death, oldest first, rather than ranked. It spans from the early 18th century to the late 20th century, highlighting key anti-colonial martyrs, freedom heroes, and subsequent historical recognition or admissions.

Selected Details About Each Martyr on the List

1. Kimpa Vita (Kingdom of Kongo, modern Angola)

Burned at the stake on 2 July 1706, aged about 22, at Evululu (Wikipedia, "Kimpa Vita"). Baptised Dona Beatriz, she fell gravely ill in 1704 and afterwards said she had received visions while near death. She then preached that Jesus was a Kongo, and that trusting the Portuguese would lead to slavery. Her Antonian movement aimed to reunite a kingdom torn apart by civil war and to Africanise Christianity (DACB). King Pedro IV, whose own wife had converted, had her arrested. At the urging of Capuchin missionaries, he had her burned for heresy. The movement outlived her: in 1708, twenty thousand Antonians marched on Pedro IV before he defeated them (Wikipedia, "Antonianism"). She came from the same region where earlier rulers had allied with the Dutch against Portuguese rule. John Thornton's 1998 Cambridge study is the standard history of her movement.

2. Kinjikitile Ngwale (German East Africa, modern Tanzania)

Hanged for treason by the Germans on 4 August 1905 (Wikipedia, "Kinjikitile Ngwale"). A spirit medium, he gave fighters maji, Swahili for water, mixed with millet and castor oil. He claimed it would turn German bullets to water. His leadership united peoples of different ethnic groups in a single movement against forced cotton growing. German troops arrested him soon after the July 1905 attacks began, and before his execution he declared that the rebellion's medicine had already spread across the region. The war he started lasted until August 1907. About 90,000 Africans fought around 2,000 German-led troops (Wikipedia, "Maji Maji Rebellion"). Germany used famine as a weapon, deliberately destroying the crops of suspected supporters (BlackPast). In 1969, the Tanzanian playwright Ebrahim Hussein made him the subject of the play Kinjeketile.

3. Koitalel Arap Samoei (Kenya)

Shot dead on 19 October 1905 by British Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen at a meeting that had been arranged as peace talks (Citizen Digital). As Orkoiyot, supreme leader of the Nandi, he had led an eleven-year resistance against the Uganda Railway crossing Nandi land. Meinertzhagen marched from Nandi Fort with 80 armed soldiers, 75 of them hidden near the meeting place, according to a Standard report. Meinertzhagen later wrote that his action haunted him for years, and admitted in writing that he had murdered Koitalel (The East African). After the killing, the British launched a final campaign in which hundreds of Nandi fighting-age men were killed (Al Jazeera, 2024). Koitalel's head was cut off and taken to England. It has never been returned. Three leadership staffs taken to Britain were eventually sent back and are kept at his mausoleum in Nandi Hills (Ukombozi Review). His family has repeatedly asked the British government for the head (Citizen Digital, 2022).

4. Hendrik Witbooi (German South West Africa, modern Namibia)

Killed in action near Vaalgras on 29 October 1905, aged about 75. His dying request was that the children should now have rest (Wikipedia, "Hendrik Witbooi"). He had led the Nama since 1888. After fighting alongside the Germans against the Herero for three years, he led the Nama in revolt on 3 October 1904. The Nama genocide that followed killed about 10,000 people, roughly half of their prewar population. German forces killed about 65,000 Herero in 1904–1908, in what historians and the UN call the first genocide of the 20th century (Reuters). In 2021, Germany formally called the killings genocide and agreed to fund €1.1 billion in development projects over 30 years, stopping short of reparations. Some Herero and Nama leaders rejected the deal. In 2019, Stuttgart's Linden Museum returned Witbooi's family Bible and his whip to Namibia, decades after German troops seized them (Art Critique).

5. Omar Mukhtar (Libya)

Hanged by Italian authorities on 16 September 1931, aged 73, at the Soluch concentration camp south of Benghazi (Wikipedia, "Omar al-Mukhtar"). For two decades he led the Senussi resistance in Cyrenaica. To cut the fighters off from support, Italy moved the 100,000 people of the Jebel Akhdar into camps on the coast and closed the Egyptian border with barbed wire. According to Fanack, two-thirds of eastern Libya's population was imprisoned in camps, and at least 40,000 people died. Mukhtar was captured on 11 September 1931 and tried on 15 September. Some 20,000 people gathered to witness his execution the next morning (Anadolu Agency). Italy hoped his death would end the resistance. Instead, he became a symbol of it: Libya's banknotes and countless streets carry his face and name.

6. Abune Petros (Ethiopia)

Executed by an Italian firing squad of eight carabinieri in central Addis Ababa in July 1936. Sources give the date as 29 or 30 July (Wikipedia, "Persecution of Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity"; DACB). He was Bishop of Dessie and refused to submit to the Italian occupation, joining the resistance instead. He was captured after a failed patriot attack on the capital, forty years after Ethiopia had defeated Italy at Adwa. Before his execution, he was offered his release if he stopped denouncing the invasion and condemned the Ethiopian patriots. He refused. He had publicly condemned Italian atrocities, including the use of mustard gas and the bombing of Red Cross hospitals (Hungarian Conservative). Worse followed. In February 1937, a 2017 study estimates, about 19,200 people were killed in Addis Ababa in the Yekatit 12 massacre, about 20% of the city's population. His 9.3-tonne statue was returned to Abune Petros Square in February 2016 after light-rail works.

7. Larbi Ben M'hidi (Algeria)

Killed by French soldiers in early March 1957 during the Battle of Algiers, after his arrest by paratroopers in February (Wikipedia, "Larbi Ben M'hidi"). He was one of the six FLN leaders who launched the revolution of 1 November 1954, and he commanded the Algiers zone from 1956. For decades the official version was that he tried to kill himself in custody and died on the way to hospital (The Local / AFP). In 2000, General Paul Aussaresses admitted that Ben M'hidi was executed while in his custody. Aussaresses said his men strangled him at a settler's farm in the Mitidja (TSA Algérie). Le Monde reports that he was hanged on the night of 3 March and that the death was disguised as suicide. On 1 November 2024, the 70th anniversary of the uprising, Macron acknowledged that soldiers under Aussaresses's command killed him.

8. Ruben Um Nyobè (Cameroon)

Shot dead by the French army on 13 September 1958 near his home village of Boumnyebel (Wikipedia, "Ruben Um Nyobè"). As secretary-general of the UPC, he took Cameroon's case to the United Nations General Assembly in 1952, 1953 and 1954. There he denounced French rule and called for a deadline for independence (BlackPast). France banned the UPC in June 1955, and its members went into hiding. The army located him using intelligence gathered under torture, according to one Cameroonian account. His body was dragged to the regional capital and put on display, disfigured (Camer.be). French authorities destroyed most of his writings, and Cameroonians were forbidden to speak his name in public until the 1990s. A joint France–Cameroon commission reported in January 2025 that a war had taken place. In July 2025, Macron acknowledged France's responsibility for the deaths of Um Nyobè and three other independence leaders.

9. Sylvanus Olympio (Togo)

Shot dead at the gate of the US embassy in Lomé on 13 January 1963, aged 60 (Wikipedia, "Emmanuel Bodjollé"). He had led Togo to independence on 27 April 1960 and became its first president. Mutinous soldiers, many of them ex-French army veterans whom Olympio had refused to enlist in the new Togolese army, broke into his home at night. He jumped from a window and hid in a car on the neighbouring US embassy grounds (Uhuru Journal, McGill). It was the first successful military coup in sub-Saharan Africa and the first time a country's leader was killed in one (LSE Africa blog). Sergeant Étienne Eyadéma, who later ruled Togo for 38 years, is named as the man who shot him. Olympio's own rule was not democratic: his party won all 51 seats after the opposition was disqualified (Encyclopedia.com).

10. Solomon Mahlangu (South Africa)

Hanged at Pretoria Central Prison on 6 April 1979, aged 22 (Wikipedia, "Solomon Mahlangu"). He left South Africa after the 1976 Soweto uprising to train with Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing. He returned in 1977 and, on 13 June, was confronted by police in Goch Street, Johannesburg. Two civilians were killed in the gunfight. It was later accepted that Mahlangu had not fired the shots that killed them. He was convicted on the argument that he shared intent with his comrade Mondy Motloung (Face2Face Africa). Governments, the United Nations and others pleaded for his life. He was one of 133 people executed by the state that year. His reported last words became a slogan of the struggle: "My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom." He was reburied in Mamelodi on 6 April 1993, and the ANC named its school in Tanzania, SOMAFCO, after him (SAHO).

Quick Answers to Commonly Asked Questions About this Topic

Which colonial powers have admitted killing these leaders?

France has made two such admissions recently. In November 2024, Macron acknowledged that French soldiers killed Larbi Ben M'hidi. In July 2025, he acknowledged France's responsibility for the deaths of Ruben Um Nyobè and other Cameroonian independence leaders. Germany recognised the Herero and Nama killings, in which Hendrik Witbooi's people died, as genocide in 2021. Britain has made no comparable admission over Koitalel Arap Samoei.

Has Koitalel Arap Samoei's head been returned?

No. Three of his leadership staffs were returned from Britain and are kept at his mausoleum in Nandi Hills. The head itself has never been found or returned, and his family and Nandi leaders have repeatedly asked the British government for it, including in 2022.

Why is Kimpa Vita on a list of freedom heroes if a Kongo king executed her?

Because she was killed for a movement that preached against Portuguese power and taught that Jesus was Kongolese. King Pedro IV ordered her death at the urging of European Capuchin missionaries, who saw her teaching as heresy. She is honoured today in Angola and the Congo as an early anti-colonial figure.

What was the first military coup in post-independence Africa?

Togo's coup of 13 January 1963, in which President Sylvanus Olympio was killed. It was the first coup in the French and British colonies that won independence in the 1950s and 1960s. Exactly four years later, on 13 January 1967, Eyadéma seized power himself.

What happened to the leaders who carried on after these martyrs died?

Many met the same fate. Kinjikitile's brother carried on the Maji Maji war until 1907. In Cameroon, Félix-Roland Moumié, Paul Momo and Jérémie Ndéléné were all killed in 1960, and France has since accepted responsibility for several of those deaths. In Kongo, Kimpa Vita's followers fought on for years after her execution.