IT IS 37 years since Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe died and it seems to me that after many years of neglect a new image of him is emerging.
South Africa is in need of him: his integrity and honesty, his total belief in people whatever their colour, his commitment to serve his people, his vision of Africa.
The apartheid government feared him and kept him imprisoned in one way or another for the last 18 years of his life: he was jailed for three years for “incitement” after his anti-pass protest ended in the Sharpeville massacre of 69 people; soon before he was to be released the government rushed the “Sobukwe Clause” through parliament to keep him locked up without trial and he spent the next six years in solitary confinement on Robben Island; then he was banished to Kimberley and he died there. In looking again at Sobukwe’s significance a key element is the assessment of Dr Derek Hook, a South African-born social psychologist at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh.
He speaks of a “resurgence of interest” in Sobukwe. Hook points to several serious studies of Sobukwe which are now being done. He is writing his own biography, another major study is being written in South Africa, and other assessments are under way in universities and political circles. Twenty-five years after my biography of Sobukwe first appeared, a 3rd edition is also being published this month.
Hook offers a thoughtful analysis to explain the developing interest in Sobukwe: “Many of the reasons undoubtedly concern the political times South Africa is living through.” He speaks of the Marikana massacre, widespread service delivery protests, mass corruption, government inefficiencies and so many disaffected people who are alienated from society.
“Heroic appeals to Sobukwe’s memory are often grounded precisely in the analysis of such political failures. “Take these words by Malaika wa Azania, an activist devoted to pursuing the African Renaissance agenda: ‘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 …
The increasing number of service delivery protests … 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 … These are Sobukwe’s disciples, blacks who refuse systematic dehumanisation.’ “We might frame these issues in a broader historical context,” says Hook, “by noting that the honeymoon of the Nelson Mandela era, with its hopefulness, its aspirations to racial reconciliation, and the hopes for building a new ‘rainbow’ nation is well and truly over.
This reflects a prevailing mood in the country. For many, the celebrations in 2014 of 20 years of democracy resulted in a period of reflection. “A new political direction is being sought. The advent of the Economic Freedom Fighters and its early electoral successes seems to make this abundantly clear.
One way of understanding the protracted mourning of Mandela and the desperate clinging to his memory concerns precisely this dilemma of direction: what is the new political dream, what co-ordinating principle will prove the compass in the unsure times ahead? “Social discontent at the pace of transformation has sullied the ANC’s image somewhat, as has the perception that the organisation has turned its back on the poor, for whom the promises of a better life have not yet materialised in as substantive a manner as might have been hoped.
“To this consideration we must add that of the problematic character of the ANC’s leader, President Jacob Zuma, who can by no stretch of the imagination be considered a leader of the same moral integrity as Sobukwe.” He goes on to note that one of the reasons Sobukwe is revered today “concerns his unbending integrity as an ethical leader, a man of principles, who increasingly, in today’s South Africa, strikes us as an image of an altogether different world, where political leaders could still be ‘uncorruptible’.
That is to say, the return to Sobukwe today should not be understood simply according to the moral attributes of Sobukwe himself — outstanding as they were – but in terms of a contemporary crisis of political leadership, and in view of the perceived decline in the moral authority of the ANC.”
Hook goes on to say: “Two related problems come to the fore here concerning the possible misuse of Sobukwe’s memory. There is, on the one hand, the prospect of an excessive idealisation — a type of over-the-top aggrandisement – in how we retrieve the historical image of Sobukwe.”
He further warns that “by treating Sobukwe as somehow more than a man we, ironically enough, do a disservice to a heroic, yet humble man, who had little time for the histrionics of political showmanship, and who ultimately put more trust in the people themselves than in leaders presenting themselves as saviours. “There is too what I term the ‘consensus of forgetting’ affecting Sobukwe’s memory.
The dual political hegemonies of the ANC and the DA voting-publics appear to agree on this point: Sobukwe’s political legacy is best consigned to the dustbin of history. “The reason for such an unlikely alliance of forgetting is not difficult to surmise.
Sobukwe’s vision of African nationalism offers biting critiques of key ideological commitments underpinning both such Congress and DA constituencies. Sobukwe attacked not only the self-serving interests of paternalistic white liberalism. He was strongly critical also of the ANC’s turn – via the activities of the Freedom Charter — to a politics of multi-racialism that turned its back on the priorities of African nationalism and the 1949 Programme of Action.
“The sad result of this consensus of forgetting is that Sobukwe, a man known for his utopian vision of a Pan-Africanist future, was for many years, seemingly better known during rather than after apartheid.” Nevertheless, he said, there were a varied range of “scattered” references to Sobukwe’s name in the (left-leaning) South African public sphere.
“These are anchored to a variety of injunctions: to celebrate the language and culture of the African continent; to heed issues of gender violence and equality; to prioritise learning and the ideal of truly African educational institutions; to herald the coming revolution of the dispossessed.”
Hook goes on to say that rather than “taking issue at the diversity of such appeals – which at times seem to diverge somewhat from Sobukwe’s own political aspirations, to claim something different to what Sobukwe himself proclaimed – we might take this as a positive sign that ‘Sobukwe’ now stands, not simply for the memory of a single man, but as the embodiment of a wide array of political aspirations.
“It is in this sense that Sobukwe as an idea provides a form of radical social critique, increasingly prominent in South Africa, which is both new, and yet not, representing as it does a historical continuity of sorts with many of Sobukwe’s most profound commitments.” There’s a lot to think about. Benjamin Pogrund’s third edition of Robert Sobukwe: How can man die better (Jonathan Ball Publishers) is now available nationwide
New life for old ideals
IT IS 37 years since Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe died and it seems to me that after many years of neglect a new image of him is emerging.
South Africa is in need of him: his integrity and honesty, his total belief in people whatever their colour, his commitment to serve his people, his vision of Africa.
The apartheid government feared him and kept him imprisoned in one way or another for the last 18 years of his life: he was jailed for three years for “incitement” after his anti-pass protest ended in the Sharpeville massacre of 69 people; soon before he was to be released the government rushed the “Sobukwe Clause” through parliament to keep him locked up without trial and he spent the next six years in solitary confinement on Robben Island; then he was banished to Kimberley and he died there. In looking again at Sobukwe’s significance a key element is the assessment of Dr Derek Hook, a South African-born social psychologist at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh.
He speaks of a “resurgence of interest” in Sobukwe. Hook points to several serious studies of Sobukwe which are now being done. He is writing his own biography, another major study is being written in South Africa, and other assessments are under way in universities and political circles. Twenty-five years after my biography of Sobukwe first appeared, a 3rd edition is also being published this month.
Hook offers a thoughtful analysis to explain the developing interest in Sobukwe: “Many of the reasons undoubtedly concern the political times South Africa is living through.” He speaks of the Marikana massacre, widespread service delivery protests, mass corruption, government inefficiencies and so many disaffected people who are alienated from society.
“Heroic appeals to Sobukwe’s memory are often grounded precisely in the analysis of such political failures. “Take these words by Malaika wa Azania, an activist devoted to pursuing the African Renaissance agenda: ‘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 …
The increasing number of service delivery protests … 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 … These are Sobukwe’s disciples, blacks who refuse systematic dehumanisation.’ “We might frame these issues in a broader historical context,” says Hook, “by noting that the honeymoon of the Nelson Mandela era, with its hopefulness, its aspirations to racial reconciliation, and the hopes for building a new ‘rainbow’ nation is well and truly over.
This reflects a prevailing mood in the country. For many, the celebrations in 2014 of 20 years of democracy resulted in a period of reflection. “A new political direction is being sought. The advent of the Economic Freedom Fighters and its early electoral successes seems to make this abundantly clear.
One way of understanding the protracted mourning of Mandela and the desperate clinging to his memory concerns precisely this dilemma of direction: what is the new political dream, what co-ordinating principle will prove the compass in the unsure times ahead? “Social discontent at the pace of transformation has sullied the ANC’s image somewhat, as has the perception that the organisation has turned its back on the poor, for whom the promises of a better life have not yet materialised in as substantive a manner as might have been hoped.
“To this consideration we must add that of the problematic character of the ANC’s leader, President Jacob Zuma, who can by no stretch of the imagination be considered a leader of the same moral integrity as Sobukwe.” He goes on to note that one of the reasons Sobukwe is revered today “concerns his unbending integrity as an ethical leader, a man of principles, who increasingly, in today’s South Africa, strikes us as an image of an altogether different world, where political leaders could still be ‘uncorruptible’.
That is to say, the return to Sobukwe today should not be understood simply according to the moral attributes of Sobukwe himself — outstanding as they were – but in terms of a contemporary crisis of political leadership, and in view of the perceived decline in the moral authority of the ANC.”
Hook goes on to say: “Two related problems come to the fore here concerning the possible misuse of Sobukwe’s memory. There is, on the one hand, the prospect of an excessive idealisation — a type of over-the-top aggrandisement – in how we retrieve the historical image of Sobukwe.”
He further warns that “by treating Sobukwe as somehow more than a man we, ironically enough, do a disservice to a heroic, yet humble man, who had little time for the histrionics of political showmanship, and who ultimately put more trust in the people themselves than in leaders presenting themselves as saviours. “There is too what I term the ‘consensus of forgetting’ affecting Sobukwe’s memory.
The dual political hegemonies of the ANC and the DA voting-publics appear to agree on this point: Sobukwe’s political legacy is best consigned to the dustbin of history. “The reason for such an unlikely alliance of forgetting is not difficult to surmise.
Sobukwe’s vision of African nationalism offers biting critiques of key ideological commitments underpinning both such Congress and DA constituencies. Sobukwe attacked not only the self-serving interests of paternalistic white liberalism. He was strongly critical also of the ANC’s turn – via the activities of the Freedom Charter — to a politics of multi-racialism that turned its back on the priorities of African nationalism and the 1949 Programme of Action.
“The sad result of this consensus of forgetting is that Sobukwe, a man known for his utopian vision of a Pan-Africanist future, was for many years, seemingly better known during rather than after apartheid.” Nevertheless, he said, there were a varied range of “scattered” references to Sobukwe’s name in the (left-leaning) South African public sphere.
“These are anchored to a variety of injunctions: to celebrate the language and culture of the African continent; to heed issues of gender violence and equality; to prioritise learning and the ideal of truly African educational institutions; to herald the coming revolution of the dispossessed.”
Hook goes on to say that rather than “taking issue at the diversity of such appeals – which at times seem to diverge somewhat from Sobukwe’s own political aspirations, to claim something different to what Sobukwe himself proclaimed – we might take this as a positive sign that ‘Sobukwe’ now stands, not simply for the memory of a single man, but as the embodiment of a wide array of political aspirations.
“It is in this sense that Sobukwe as an idea provides a form of radical social critique, increasingly prominent in South Africa, which is both new, and yet not, representing as it does a historical continuity of sorts with many of Sobukwe’s most profound commitments.” There’s a lot to think about. Benjamin Pogrund’s third edition of Robert Sobukwe: How can man die better (Jonathan Ball Publishers) is now available nationwide
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