Moïse Kapenda Tshombe (November 10, 1919 – June 29, 1969) was a Congolese politician.

He was the son of a successful Congolese businessman and was born in Musumba, Congo. He received his education from an American missionary school and later trained as an accountant. In the 1950s, he took over a chain of stores in Katanga Province and became involved in politics, founding the CONAKAT party with Godefroid Munongo which ran under a banner of an independent, federal Congo.

In the general elections of 1960, CONAKAT won control of the Katanga provincial legislature. That same year, the Congo became an independent republic, and in the resulting strife, Tshombe and CONAKAT declared Katanga's secession from the rest of the Congo. See Congo Crisis.

The Christian, anti-communist, pro-Western Tshombe was elected president of Katanga in August 1960, and declared that "we are seceding from chaos." Favoring continued ties with Belgium, Tshombe asked the Belgian government to send military officers to recruit and train a Katangese army. The Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and his successor Cyrille Adoula requested intervention from United Nations forces, which they never received.

Malcolm X ( /ˈmælkəm ˈɛks/; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Arabic: الحاجّ مالك الشباز‎), was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers, he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. Detractors accused him of preaching racism, black supremacy, antisemitism, and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history.

Malcolm X's father died—killed by white supremacists, it was rumored—when he was young, and at least one of his uncles was lynched. When he was thirteen, his mother was placed in a mental hospital, and he was placed in a series of foster homes. In 1946, at age 20, he went to prison for breaking and entering.

In prison, Malcolm X became a member of the Nation of Islam and after his parole in 1952 he quickly rose to become one of its leaders. For a dozen years Malcolm X was the public face of the controversial group, but disillusionment with Nation of Islam head Elijah Muhammad led him to leave the Nation in March 1964. After a period of travel in Africa and the Middle East, he returned to the United States, where he founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. In February 1965, less than a year after leaving the Nation of Islam, he was assassinated by three members of the group.

Patrice Émery Lumumba (2 July 1925 – 17 January 1961) was a Congolese independence leader and the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo after he helped win its independence from Belgium in June 1960. Only twelve weeks later, Lumumba's government was deposed in a coup during the Congo Crisis. He was subsequently imprisoned and executed by firing squad, an act that was committed with the assistance of the government of Belgium, for which the Belgian government officially apologized in 2002.

Lumumba was born in Onalua in the Katakokombe region of the Kasai province of the Belgian Congo, a member of the Tetela ethnic group. Raised in a Catholic family as one of four sons, he was educated at a Protestant primary school, a Catholic missionary school, and finally the government post office training school, passing the one-year course with distinction. He subsequently worked in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and Stanleyville (now Kisangani) as a postal clerk and as a travelling beer salesman. In 1951, he married Pauline Opangu. In 1955, Lumumba became regional head of the Cercles of Stanleyville and joined the Liberal Party of Belgium, where he worked on editing and distributing party literature. After traveling on a three-week study tour in Belgium, he was arrested in 1955 on charges of embezzlement of post office funds. His two-year sentence was commuted to twelve months after it was confirmed by Belgian lawyer Jules Chrome that Lumumba had returned the funds, and he was released in July 1956. After his release, he helped found the broad-based Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) in 1958, later becoming the organization's president. Lumumba and his team represented the MNC at the All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra, Ghana, in December 1958. At this international conference, hosted by influential Pan-African President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Lumumba further solidified his Pan-Africanist beliefs.

Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, MBE (born 9 December 1950) is a British singer, songwriter and guitarist. Armatrading is a three-time Grammy Award-nominee and has been nominated twice for BRIT Awards as Best Female Artist. She also received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996. In a recording career spanning 40 years she has released a total of 17 studio albums, as well as several live albums and compilations.

Joan Armatrading was born in Basseterre, on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, in 1950, as the third of six children. Her mother was born in Antigua and her father was from Saint Kitts. When she was three, her parents moved with their two eldest boys to Birmingham, England, and she lived with her grandmother on Antigua. She joined her parents in a district of Birmingham in early 1958, at the age of seven. Her father had played in a band in his youth, later forbidding his children from touching his guitar. Armatrading began writing lyrics and music at the age of 14 on a piano that her mother had purchased as "a piece of furniture". Shortly thereafter her mother bought her a £3 guitar from a pawn shop in exchange for two prams, and the younger Armatrading began teaching herself the instrument.