Sculptor and draughtsman Ezrom Legae was born in 1938 in Vrededorp, Johannesburg, South Africa. A student at the Polly Street Art Centre (the first public art school open to blacks) in 1959, Legae studied with Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Kumaol at the Jubilee Art Centre from 1960 to 1964. He became a teacher in 1965 and subsequently codirector of the Jubilee Art Centre. Legae received a scholarship in 1970 to travel to Europe and the United States. From 1972 to 1974, he was director of the African Music and Drama Association Art Project.

From the mid-1970s until his death in January 1999, Legae lived in Soweto, Johannesburg, with his family and worked full time as an artist. He is best known for his powerful visual commentaries on the pathos and degradation of apartheid--a critique he extended to the persistence of poverty and racism in the post-apartheid years.