Africa is still waiting for the dawn

Pumla Gqola

Pumla Gqola, Mail & Guardian

I want to conjure up an image of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe that is slightly out of focus in post-apartheid Southern Africa: we concentrate usually on the man who gave us the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959, was imprisoned in 1960 on Robben Island, a revolutionary whose vision, words, humaneness is known.

I want to talk about Sobukwe’s valuing of the imagination, the Sobukwe who took great pleasure in the nonobvious, who relished works of the imagination.

But he also understood the value of the imagination when unbounded, not limited to the pages of a novel or a performance on a stage.

That is what the iconic image of Sobukwe letting soil fall through his fingers is: recourse to the metaphoric, the poetic, the symbolic, when ordinary words were both unavailable and inadequate.

Pumla Gqola: 8th Robert Sobukwe Memorial Lecture

Why Robert Sobukwe is not dead

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.

Remember Sobukwe!