Robert Sobukwe

Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe was born in Graaff-Reinet, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, on the fifth of December 1924. He took his undergraduate degree at the University of Fort Hare and taught Zulu and English at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was, by his colleagues' assessment, the most intellectually formidable South African political figure of his generation.

In 1959 he co-founded the Pan-Africanist Congress as a breakaway from the African National Congress, on the proposition that South Africa's struggle required an explicitly Africanist political vehicle rather than the ANC's multiracialism. He was the PAC's first president.

On the twenty-first of March 1960, Sobukwe led the Sharpeville Anti-Pass Campaign — the demonstration at which sixty-nine unarmed protesters, including Sobukwe himself, were shot by South African police. The event entered the international record as the Sharpeville massacre. The apartheid regime banned the PAC and the ANC three weeks later.

Sobukwe was sentenced to three years in prison for inciting the campaign. At the expiration of his sentence in 1963 the apartheid Parliament passed the General Law Amendment Act — known to history as the Sobukwe Clause — which permitted his continued detention without trial, renewable annually, for as long as the Minister of Justice deemed it necessary. He was held on Robben Island in solitary confinement for six additional years under this clause.

Released in 1969 under banning orders that confined him to Kimberley, he was forbidden to attend any political gathering, forbidden to be quoted in print, and forbidden to leave the magisterial district. He practiced law in Kimberley until his death from lung cancer on the twenty-seventh of February 1978, age fifty-three.

He is honored here as the philosopher of South African Africanism — the man whose detention the apartheid Parliament wrote a law for.