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| Robert Sobumkwe |
It is through the people taking part in service delivery
protests, and those who refuse systematic dehumanisation that the founder of
the PAC lives, writes Malaika Wa Azania. The Sunday Independent
Johannesburg - African intellectual revolutionary Thomas
Sankara, the former president of Burkina Faso, once argued that while
revolutionaries as individuals can be killed, you cannot kill an idea. Victor
Hugo went further to argue that there is nothing in the world more powerful
than an idea whose time has come.
No truer arguments have been made, or as vividly evidenced as
in the life of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, the founding president of the Pan
Africanist Congress of Azania.
This month, Sobukwe month, we not only celebrate the
contributions of a great man to the struggle for our liberation, we also take
time to reflect on the journey we have travelled as African people, necessarily
asking ourselves whether our revolution is still on course or if, like many others
before it, it is a revolution betrayed.
Born to a domestic worker and a municipal labourer in
Graaff-Reinet in 1924, Sobukwe was an ordinary young black child playing on the
dusty streets of a highly segregated South Africa.
It was not until he enrolled at Fort Hare University for his
tertiary education in 1947 that Sobukwe became drawn to politics.
Fort Hare University, a historically black institution in the
heart of the Eastern Cape, had produced a great number of radical intellectuals
preoccupied with the deconstruction of the colonial order.
It was here that Sobukwe met a lecturer named Cecil Ntloko, a
follower of the All African Convention, and the man who ignited a spark in the
mind of what would become one of the continent’s greatest revolutionaries.
Sobukwe became a member of the ANC Youth League in 1948 and a
year later, he was elected as the student representative council president of
the university. Inspired by the writings of Anton Lembede, the founding
president of the Youth League, Sobukwe’s ideological outlook as an Africanist
became sharpened by the prevailing material conditions of the time, a period
where apartheid was undergoing formal systematisation.
Just over 10 years later, Sobukwe and a group of Africanists
broke away from the ANC to established the PAC, a controversial move that saw
the birth of a new era of militancy and radical politics.
This paradigm shift from the passive resistance modus
operandi of the Defiance Campaign of the earlier part of the 1950s was largely
influenced by the growing tidal wave of Africanism sweeping the entire
continent.
This wave resulted in the political liberation of a number of
African states that had been colonies for many decades, and gave birth to the
Organisation of African Unity in 1963, an institution that would later play a
critical role in the mobilisation and organising of African states towards the
attainment of political independence from colonial powers.
The 1960 Sharpeville/Langa Massacre that was organised by the
PAC was a turning point in the struggle history of our country.
Following this event, in which unarmed black men, women and
children protesting against the unjustness of the draconian pass laws were
gunned down by apartheid police, the state increased its brutality against
natives.
The country was rendered an abattoir where daily, hundreds of
black people were being killed, tortured and incarcerated.
Liberation movements were banned and many freedom fighters
were forced to flee to exile or go underground.
In 1963, three years after his arrest, the year when he was
supposed to have been released, a legislation known as the Sobukwe Clause,
which was part of the General Law Amendment Act No 37 of 1963 that allowed
people already convicted of political offences to be further detained for a
period determined at the sole discretion of the Minister of Justice, was
passed.
This resulted in the further detainment of Sobukwe in
solitary confinement on Robben Island, where he remained until he was released
in 1969, and banished to the township of Galeshewe in Kimberley, in the
Northern Cape.
Nine years later, Sobukwe died of lung cancer.
The physical death of Sobukwe must never be mistaken for the
death of Sobukwe as a vessel of an idea, for though he now rests in a cemetery
in Graaff-Reinet, with what was once his flesh now decomposed and fossilised,
the idea that he died fighting, continues to live.
It is Sobukwe’s idea of an Africa for Africans that inspired
the birth of the Black Consciousness Movement that brought the apartheid regime
to its knees.
The idea behind the Black Consciousness Movement’s (BCM)
insistence on the mobilisation of the colonised majority, drew great
inspiration from Sobukwe’s reason for rejecting co-operation with white and
Asian anti-apartheid groups.
Steve Biko, the founder of BCM, was greatly influenced by the
ideas that had been articulated by Sobukwe.
It was Sobukwe who posited the argument later refined by
Biko, that years of white supremacy had conditioned whites to be dominant and
blacks to be submissive and because of this, blacks needed, above all,
psychological independence.
He argued: “There are Europeans who are intellectually
converts to the African’s cause, but, because they materially benefit from the
present set-up, they cannot completely identify with that cause.
“Real democracy can come only when blacks by themselves
formulate policies and programmes and decide on the method of struggle without
interference from… the minorities who arrogantly appropriate to themselves the
right to plan and think for the African.”
From this argument put forth by Sobukwe, inspired by the
writings of another great Africanist intellectual, Lembede, a movement of young
black people was born.
The BCM mobilised around the idea of the decolonisation of
the black mind as a necessary requisite for the decolonisation of the African
economy.
It was this movement that sparked the 1976 student uprisings,
uprisings that were a turning point in the liberation struggle of our country.
The youth of 1976 were not merely fighting against the use of
Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. They were fighting against the consistent
colonisation of the black mind. They were fighting against the dispossession of
black humanity.
This year, exactly 36 years since his death, we are sitting
on the threshold of yet another Sobukwe-inspired moment.
Two decades into a democratic dispensation that is
characterised by growing levels of inequality and the ever-persistent reality
of landlessness that has resulted in the disenfranchisement of black people,
there is a silent wave of consciousness that is sweeping through the dusty
streets of our country. To ignore its magnitude, is to be in denial of truth.
It would be a sensationalist untruth to claim that South
Africa in 2014 is the same as South Africa in 1984.
There has been some progress made in so far as attempting to
redress some of the injustices of the past, particularly as it relates to
freedoms of movement and association, which must never be undermined or easily
dismissed.
But equally true is that post-apartheid South Africa is still
a colonial state, evidenced by white monopoly capital and the failure to
address the fundamental land and agrarian question.
For the past two decades, the claws of economic bondage have
suffocated black people.
The firm grip has resulted in soaring levels of unemployment,
poverty and disease, a parallel reality to the general comfort of whiteness
that is insulated by a system that continues to protect white privilege.
For many of us who are located within historically white
institutions of higher learning, apartheid is not a theory or a point of
reference to a distant history.
It is a reality evidenced daily in the preferential treatment
given to white students, and the ostracisation of black students that goes
beyond financial and academic exclusions.
The reality of the situation is that while apartheid as
policy has been annihilated, apartheid as a philosophy remains
institutionalised even within the state, where organs such as the judiciary
remain highly untransformed.
But there is a rapture happening in our country. There is an
awakening of black people.
There is a sense of consciousness that is slowly but surely
creeping into our communities.
Government officials, in their usual narrowness and endless
capacity for manufacturing conspiracy theories, want to have us believe that
the increasing number of service delivery protests is a result of some “third
force”.
In truth, they are a result of disenfranchised masses
fighting for the right to humanness.
These are people who are refusing to continue living in
squalor, to being accessories to corruption, maladministration and mediocre
leadership, obese with immorality and a lack of integrity.
Above all, these are people who, like the masses that marched
to Sharpeville in 1960 and the students who took to the streets in 1976, are
making a clear statement to the regime, a statement that says the black
condition is unacceptable.
These are Sobukwe’s disciples, blacks who refuse systematic
dehumanisation.
