From Table Bay to Sharpeville - The spirit of Robert Sobukwe

Written by Dr Magaugau
Tuesday, 05 July 2011 12:36

“I say it once more Benjie: Nobody is going to be ‘taught a lesson’ by anybody. The days for that type of mentality are over: between nations and between individuals. Our own children demand that we justify our ‘right’ to teach them a lesson.” Robert Sobukwe – in a 1968 letter to Rand Daily Mail journalist and his biographer, Benjamin Pogrund, while he was incarcerated on Robben Island.

Two of South Africa’s watershed historic dates are April 6 1652 and March 21 1960. Of course, the first one relates to the European colonisation of the southern tip of the Mother Continent when the Dutch arrived on Table Bay under the command of Jan van Riebeeck and established a refreshment station – ‘the tavern of the seas’ – for European ships that were trading with the East.

The fated encounter between the Dutch settlers and the first Africans to inhabit this part of the country – the hunter-gatherer and nomadic societies of the Khoi and the San – was to shape South Africa’s race relations and government policies for the next 359 years.
In the intervening decades and centuries, this colonist-colonised encounter witnessed epochal moments in the country’s history – notably slavery in the Cape; the 100-Year Frontier Wars between the British settlers and the Xhosa kingdoms; the Great Trek and the Anglo-Zulu Wars which saw the first defeat of the British forces on foreign soil at Isandlwana in the hands of the Zulu armies and culminated in the equally heroic but ill-fated Bambatha Rebellion of 1906.

These key historic events as well as other epochal periods such as the discovery of gold on the Reef and the rise of Afrikaner Nationalist rule in 1948, contributed significantly to the systematic, state-sanctioned land dispossession of the indigenous people through brutal and violent forced removals under Apartheid rule. On the other hand, the pass laws controlled the movement of Africans in the cities 24 hours a day.

It is against this background that March 21 1960 saw the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, under the charismatic leadership of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (1924-1978), organised protest marches in defiance of the Pass Laws. Sobukwe personally led an anti-pass campaign in Orlando East, Soweto, where the protestors marched to a local police station and handed their passes and themselves to the authorities.

These events were to capture international headlines and became an enduring symbol of the suffering and defiance of Africans when soldiers in Sharpeville opened fire on scores of defenceless men, women and children – killing 69 and maiming for life hundreds. These epic anti-pass campaigns also witnessed similar massacres in the Cape townships of Langa and Nyanga.

As already indicated above, Sharpeville Day [later renamed Human Rights Day by the ANC government in a move that is seen by Pan Africanists and some independent observers as sanitising of history to undermine Sobukwe and the PAC’s political legacy] immediately captured international attention and was commemorated globally in solidarity with the anti-apartheid struggle as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in the world.

What most history books have failed to chronicle – deliberately or otherwise – is that the organisation responsible for the historic Anti-Pass Campaign was formed on April 6 1959 – exactly 307 years since the landing of Jan van Riebeeck on Table Bay.

Following the massacres, Sobukwe was immediately gaoled in a Johannesburg prison – Number Four – where he was awaiting trial. He was then transferred to Stoneyard Prison in Benoni, followed by Stofberg and Witbank in the eastern Transvaal and finally Pretoria Central Prison where he served a three-year term.

On his ‘release’ he was handcuffed and sent to Robben Island in May 1963 (ahead of the famous Rivonia Trialists) where he was kept in solitary confinement for six years under the notorious Sobukwe Clause – a special law tabled in Parliament to keep him in jail indefinitely at the whim of the Minister of Justice; isolated from other prisoners and forbidden even to talk to his jailers because the apartheid authorities regarded him as the country’s most dangerous leader.

According to his wife, Veronica Sobukwe, even the opposition party in Parliament supported his incarceration, with the exception of its leader Helen Suzman. But the authorities had the ‘grace’ to allow him ‘luxuries’ such as books and writing letters to family and friends. When he was ‘released’ in 1969 he was banished to Kimberley, kept under house arrest as a banned person; which means he could not be quoted in the media.

The cause of Sobukwe’s death in 1978 is generally said to be lung cancer, but his wife’s submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997 indicates that while on Robben Island, he had complained that his food was served with broken glasses. She also told the Commission that in 1964 while he was on the island he was suffering from chronic sinus inflammation and though his condition was deteriorating, the authorities were dead set against an independent specialist treating Sobukwe because they said they were treating him themselves – with pain killers and massages.          

But who was Robert Sobukwe and what is his political legacy in Azania? – as he would have referred to South Africa. One of the most eloquent observations ironically comes from the pen of a white liberal journalist, Patrick Laurence, of The Star. “What impressed me most about him is his personal dignity,” he wrote. “There is a gentleness about him; not the gentleness of the meek, but that of a man who knows he does not have to shout. Within and beyond it are a passionate conviction and an iron will.”

“Though he is a man of great intellectual vigour, the bedrock of his strength is faith – belief in the slow but inexorable advance of African Nationalism – confidence in the future buttressed by a particular view of the past. His continued commitment to Pan Africanism, even after all these years of isolation and political quarantine, have been acknowledged by some of his staunchest political enemies.”

Ironically, Sobukwe’s ‘staunchest political enemies’ did not only include racial supremacists like Prime Minister HF Verwoerd and Nat supporters, but fellow struggle compatriots within the ANC camp. As a young firebrand and student at Fort Hare, he was a member of the Africanist wing of the ANC Youth League alongside Ashby Peter Mda, Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo.

He had participated in the Defiance Campaign of 1952 and lost his teaching post in Standerton as a result of his involvement in the historic civil disobedience. When the ANC adopted the Kliptown Charter in 1955, which proclaims that the ‘land belongs to all who live in it – black and white’, he felt that he organisation was undermining the tragic problems of land dispossession and four years later he led a breakaway group that became known as the Pan Africanist Party of Azania – a move that left a sour taste in the mouths of some of the Youth Leaguers he left behind.

Politically and philosophically, Sobukwe was a Pan Africanist and humanist; and therefore didn’t consider anybody or any race as enemies. In this regard, he saw the destiny of the rest of the world as tied to that of the Mother Continent. In an address during a graduation ceremony at Fort Hare when he was only 24, he said, “We have chosen African Nationalism because of its deep human significance; because of its inevitability and necessity to world progress.”

“World civilisation will not be complete until the African has made his full contribution…I wish to make it clear again that we are anti-nobody. We are pro-Africa. We breathe, we dream, we live Africa; because Africa and humanity are inseparable. It is only by doing the same that the minorities in this land – the European, Coloured and Indian, can secure mental and spiritual freedom. On the liberation of the African depends the liberation of the entire world.”

Contrary to propaganda by the enemies of the Africanist cause that Sobukwe was a racist, he was in fact a non-racist humanist who defined Africans as those who pledge loyalty to the good of the Mother Continent – irrespective of colour or geographic origin. In fact some of the members of his organisation were of European descent, notably Patrick Duncan and Costa Gazi. “The Africanists take the view that there is only one race to which all belong, and that is the human race,” he told delegates at the inaugural address of the convention of Africanists.

“In our vocabulary, therefore, the word ‘race’ as applied to man has no plural form. We do, however, admit the existence of observable physical differences between various groups of people, but these differences are a result of a number of factors, chief among which has been geographical isolation.” Sobukwe therefore pioneered the concept of non-racialism which was eventually supplanted by the ANC (at the time the champions of multi-racialism).

That, dear readers, is part of his political legacy, but in a more poignant and significant way, his views found resonance in the Black Consciousness philosophy that had directly acknowledged his philosophical and political influence. One of Black Consciousness’s central tenets as articulated by Steven Bantu Biko was self-reliance as a means of the oppressor’s quest for freedom, is evident in Sobukwe’s speeches.

For instance, “We do not wish to use anybody, nor do we intend to be used by anybody. We want to make the African people conscious of the fact that they have to win their own liberation, rely on themselves to carry on a relentless and determined struggle instead of relying on court cases and negotiations on their behalf by ‘sympathetic’ whites.”

After years of complaints from his family and followers that Sobukwe’s legacy was being ignored by the ANC government, his name was recently in the spotlight not only because February marked the 33rd anniversary of his lonely death, but because seemingly the government has realised that you cannot keep a good man down. He has to take his rightful place in the pantheon of the country and indeed Africa’s liberation heroes. Latest reports indicate that his grave in his birthplace of Graaff-Reinet, Western Cape, is likely to be transformed into a national monument while the Nelson Mandela Foundation recently hosted a Sobukwe Exhibition in collaboration with the Robert Sobukwe Trust.

Whether these gestures will be seen by Africanists as a genuine acknowledgment of Sobukwe’s rich political legacy or as its ‘hijacking’ is a matter of debate.