INDEPENDENT MEDIA Robert Sobukwe would have turned 90 on Friday.Malaika wa Azania reflects upon the legacy of a true leader, and what his life means for the youth today.
A few weeks before he was brutally assassinated, the former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Isidore Sankara, made a profound statement about the immortality of ideas. He said: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.”
This statement found expression in many instances, including that of his own untimely death at the hands of his own comrades.
It is also most apt in the case of the death of the founding president of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) and one of the key role players of the pan-Africanist movement, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.
His physical death failed to kill an idea – one that has continued to live on long after his body has atrophied.
On Friday, Sobukwe would have turned 90. He would have been a fountain of wisdom from which my generation would drink to quench its thirst for knowledge and identity.
But Sobukwe was not around to enjoy his birthday, because a regime characterised by absolute human cruelty and the worst forms of violence against black humanity brutalised him and drove him to an early grave.
In 1978, when the body of Sobukwe succumbed to the suffering that had been birthed within the cold walls of an isolated prison cell on Robben Island, South Africa lost one of its most upright children.
The death of Sobukwe, which happened less than a year after the death of another Africanist, founder of the South African Students Organisation, Bantu Steve Biko, robbed our country of a true revolutionary who was guided by great feelings of love for his people.
But the idea that Sobukwe lived, fought and died for is alive.
The idea of an Africa that is free from the clutches of economic bondage and mental slavery is one that gives oxygen to the life of my generation; a generation that is conveniently referred to as a “born-free generation” by peddlers of neo-liberal discourse and champions of anti-blackness.
Like many young South Africans who have gone through the biblical tragedy that we call a “basic education system”, I was never taught about the upright man that is Sobukwe – beyond the infrequent brief reference to the PAC – in the study of South African history.
This reference to Sobukwe was often a one-liner in a module that bombarded us with a biased history that seeks to make of our people by-standers in the struggle for their own liberation.
High-school history is a subject designed for the appeasing of white conscience.
As such, one learned more about the savagery of the black-on-black violence known as mfecane (a violence whose colonial construct is never delved into) than one did about the impact of the wave of pan-Africanism that swept through the continent and informed the many liberation struggles that are a feature of a history that we carry on our backs.
One learned more about a history that presents black people as perpetual victims of white-created circumstances than as a triumphant people who built cities such as Great Zimbabwe, had the intellectual capacity to comprehend physical sciences, alchemy, astronomy, mathematics and all things that are today posited as discoveries and inventions of the white man.
I had to teach myself about Sobukwe in the same way as I’ve had to teach myself about other progressive forces, the likes of Kaoberdiano Dambara, Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur, Sabelo Pama, Onkgopotse Tiro and many others who make the education curriculum too uncomfortable to teach us about.
In learning about Sobukwe, I opened up a whole new world: one where I was not a defeated black person submerged in a system that thrived on my subjugation, but a black person with agency to not only diagnose my own condition, but to then architect a pedagogy that would liberate me from it.
One of the most difficult things that many young black children have had to go through in post-apartheid South Africa is assimilation into multi-racial institutions of higher learning.
This diabolical transition that is rarely spoken about has left many of us with hidden scars that are a permanent mark on our well-concealed vulnerability.
In my book, Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation, I speak extensively about the lived experiences of the black working-class child who goes through an education system that is designed to tear away at her self-esteem and self-worth, and how that perpetuates the logic of white supremacy and systematic racism.
Sobukwe knew better than most people the nature of this inhuman reality because, like us, he had to navigate through this same education system and ultimately became its worst critic. And yet, in his criticism, he also drew strength to teach us how to cope, how to remain black-conscious in the midst of white onslaught.
One of the most important lessons that I draw from Sobukwe is the necessity of utopian thinking in the quest for the realisation of a truly liberated Africa and the need to never succumb to whitewash.
Sobukwe spoke extensively of a United States of Africa, an unimaginable concept given the extremely divided nature of the continent, especially in the pre-independence period.
South Africa was fighting against colonialism and apartheid; Tanzania was trying to unite more than 100 tribes to create a national identity; Zimbabwe was under a segregationist Smithian regime, and the Biafra War was tearing Nigeria asunder.
In the midst of all that, here was this idealist speaking about one government and African unity. The sheer audacity of such utopia! And yet, we sit here today with an Africa that has made steps towards addressing unity, even as there are still many obstacles to the ideal.
The creation of the Organisation of African Unity, the much later creation of regional economic communities, the relaxing of visa regulations across regions and many other facts, are a vivid illustration of how these ideas that Sobukwe had, which seemed ludicrous, were the foundation for progressiveness.
Utopian thinking in our struggle as modern-day pan-Africanists assists in the fashioning of a higher civilisation, for it teaches one to imagine an Africa that is free from all constructs of colonialism and imperial devastation.
As a protest writer, I draw my inspiration from the imagination of another Africa, and of Azania unoccupied. It is for that reason that although I reject the notion of “born-frees”, I also believe that it is not impossible, for though they may not be in existence now, the beautiful ones are yet to be born. They will be born.
Sobukwe has taught me to never drown in defeatism, to continue to imagine and strive for the renaissance of Africa in its most progressive form. And as we celebrate his 90th birthday, may we all reflect on what his legacy means not only to our country, but to ourselves as individuals.
Aluta continua!
* Malaika wa Azania is author of Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Sunday Independent