At 16 she wrote letters to Robben Island prisoners. Three decades later, one man gave every letter back

As a 16-year-old in Heideveld, Cape Town, Sidley du Preez began writing letters to political prisoners on Robben Island — with, as she puts it, 'no position, influence or idea whether those letters mattered.' More than thirty years later, one of the former prisoners returned every single letter she had written and told her what they had meant during some of his darkest moments. Today she carries that lesson into Cape Town high schools through her work Leadership Before Power, and her research paper drawn from the letters — 'Letters Under Censorship' — has been accepted for presentation at the World Literacy Summit 2027 in Oxford.

SDG 4 · Quality education — Mechanism: individual leader