PETER NKUTSOEU RABOROKO

Defier of the Undefiable: Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe

by

Peter Nkutsoeu Raboroko

Mangaliso took a holiday.  The Information and Publicity Office did not say a word about it.

For the first time in three years Mangaliso took a three weeks’ holiday.  It was a holiday from home and politics.  He made a sentimental journey to his home town to set his heart at ease and to renew old memories.

Mangaliso returned.  It was on Tuesday evening in January 1960 that we met him again.  We were having our usual Working Committee Meeting.  Magaliso, P.K. Leballo and I, all lit our pipes and smoked them.  We were seated in our Mylur House suite of offices.
 
We knew that Mangaliso needed that holiday.  We were shocked but not surprised when he gave out that it had been a busman’s holiday.

Mangaliso was the only African serving on the staff of our most senior settler University.  Modesty is one of his virtues but once in a while he would remind me that he was the only member of the staff who was a politician.  I would admit it.  We admired him.

As student and scholar politician, he made the grade and we placed him above mediocre.  We respected him.

We soon found out that he was principled, dedicated and understanding.  We loved him.

We should call him Mr. President but, we call him Professor.  He presides over our meetings with the touch of a master hand, as only a university rector would.

We think the world of him.

“Well, Prof,” I began before formal business, “how did the old folk at home like your new office as President of the Pan-Africanist Congress and National Leader of the African People?”

“You see Pete,” he said addressing me but confiding in all of us.  “They did not seem to like it very much.  One of my brothers had just been ordained a Methodist Minister and so he stole the thunder.  Besides the old folk felt that he had chosen the better lot.  They felt the more so when I told them that I was going to give up my Varsity job.”

We all laughed.  And that was that.

The first (and the last) P.A.C. Annual Conference held on the 19th and 20th December, 1959 in Orlando had decided on the launching of the Positive Action Campaign.  The aim of the campaign was to overthrow white domination and to attain freedom and independence.

The abolition of the pass laws, a very hardy annual was pin-pointed as the first step in that Campaign.  The notorious settler-imposed pass now called “the reference book” by settler officials, is something much more than a scrap of paper.  It is a powerful instrument of unbridled economic exploitation.  Its use the core around which the political oppression and social degredation of the African revolves.
           
National Conference had decided.  The National Executive Committee had to sort out the details.  The National Working Committee to finalize them.  And the National Secretariat to set the whole party machinery in motion.  The Secretariat entrust the task of announcing the plan and the launching date to the President.

On December 20, 1950, Mangaliso took his daughter along with him to Graaff-Reinet, his home town.  He staff-nurse wife, a son and infant twin sons at home in Mofolo Village.

“When puppets are born no comets are seen.  The heavens themselves the birth of leaders proclaim.”

The thirty-four-year old Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was born at a time when the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, with its 250,000 worker and peasant members has reached the zenith of its power.

General J. B. M. Hertzof, a later settler Premier had donated ten pounds (£10) to its fund and Dr. D. F. Malan, the man who coined the word apartheid and another later settler Premier has publicly announced that the African and the settler Afrikaner peoples were the only true African nationalists in South Africa.  The Afrikaner leadership was beginning to realise where the real interests of the white masses in South Africa lie.

This “I.C.U. Mr. Whiteman” movement, was it was popularly styled, had completely usurped the political functions of the South African Native National Congress which had been born in 1912.  Mr. Clement Kadalie, a Nyasaland African, was the I.C.U. national leader.  In those days he was the only star in the political heavens of South Africa.

Sobukwe’s middle name was Mangaliso: Man of Wonders.  The association of his name with the meteoric rise of Clement Kadalie and the meaning and significance of his own middle name both seem prophetic.

Fate placed Mangaliso Sobukwe at the supreme head of the Africanist movement.  It become the role of that movement to fill the political vacuum of the day even as the I.C.U. movement had done during an earlier day.  Around him the liberation movement was destined to mature both politically and ideologically.  Mangaliso, the politician was to become the only star in the South African political skies in his day.

Song of a Methodist preacher and himself a preacher until politics claimed his whole being, Mangaliso received his primary education in his home town.  He matriculated in first class at the Healdtown Institution.

Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained were the twin companions of his youthful high school days.  Small wonder that the speeches and writings of Mangaliso, the man, are not only invariably pregnant with celestial fire but are also never without the Miltonic touch of the grand style.

He read for Bachelor of Arts degree at Fort Hare University College long before that venerable institution had degenerated into that cesspool of slave-eduction, a Bantu tribal college.  By popular vote he was soon elected President of the Students’ Representative Council.
 
When the Fort Hare students effectively boycotted the settler Governon-General on the occasion of his visit there, Mangaliso had been the master-mind behind that boycott.  His Excellency was boycotted because he was the symbolic head of an oppressive settler minority.

When the nurses as the neighbouring  Lovedale Hospital went on strike as a protest against the intolerable conditions imposed upon them by the settler missionary authorities, Mangaliso and his S.R.C. gave them full material and spiritual support.  One of them later became his wife.

He was also elected to the chairmanship of the Fort Hare Branch of the African National Congress Youth League, an extra-mural organisation.  The League was in affiliate of the African Congress which had superseded the Native Congress a generation later.
 
The 1912 Native Congress under the presidency of Dr. Johan L. Dube had been a multi-tribal front with nationalist tendencies.

It styled itself “the mouthpiece of the native peoples.”  Upon payment of five pounds by a chief all his tribesmen automatically became Congressites for that year.

The President alone was an elected official.  He had to be of “pure” African descent.  It was his right to nominate all the members of his “Cabinet”.

The 1943 African Congress under the leadership of Dr. A. B. Xuma began as a national front with nationalist tendencies.  It had individual membership and subscription fees of two shillings and six pence a year.  Membership to the National Executive Committee was on the elective principle.  The job reservation Clause of the National Congress was scrapped.

The 1943 Youth League, whose first meeting the present writer convened and presided over, was a national youth front with nationalist orientation.  Its basic policy and programme rejected foreign domination and foreign leadership and opted for the right of self-determination for the African people.

It was to the Branch Chairmanship of such a league that Mangaliso was elected.  It was as leader of the Fort Hare delegation to the annual conference of the African Congress that he played a leading role in the adoption of the 1949 Programme of Action.

The Programme substantially embodied the League’s basic policy and programme.  It also accepted non-collaboration with the oppressor as a political weapon and postulated mass civil disobedience as the basis of a dynamic approach.
           
In its last days, therefore, the African Congress became a militant national front with a powerful national orientation.
           
The 1952 Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign flowed from this Programme of Action.  More than 8,000 defiers went to jail.  The initiative in the struggle for Freedom and Independence had passed from the settler authorities to the African nationalists.

Mangaliso, a teacher on the staff of Standerton High School under the Transvaal Education Department, supported the Defiance Campaign from public platforms.  The settle education authorities retaliated by instantly firing him.  Mass indignation at his dismissal became such that the authorities had no choice but to reinstate him unconditionally.

Four years later Mangaliso was appointed lecture in African studies in the country’s leading settler educational institution, the University of Witwatersrand.  The appointment brought him into the ambit of the Africanist headquarters, and enabled him to engage in politics more freely.  He soon became editor of the Africanist—revolutionary organ o the Africanist movement.

It also enabled him to snatch some time from a busy life and to complete the requirements for his Honours Degree.  The manuscript of his Master’s thesis for the submission of which he never found the time is in the keeping of the present writer.

The reasons for the existence of the Pan-Africanist Congress over which Mangaliso presided are enshrined in the 1959 Constitution as follows:

The Africanist Congress, the latest concrete expression of the liberation
movement in South Africa is therefore a national front with a Pan-Africanist orientation, a socialist basis and an Africanist outlook.

By his election to the position of “first among equals” in such congress, Mangaliso became destiny’s chief tool for filling the political and ideological vacuum in South Africa, and for filling yet another role demanded by the exigencies of his time: the role of defier of the anti-defiance measure of the settler community.

On the balance of probabilities the Defiance Campaign had shown that while constitutional authority in South Africa vests in the settler government, political power itself whose real content is majority support is the prerogative of the national liberation movement.  Over the intervening years, the crucial task became the establishing of that condition beyond shadow of doubt.

As the Defiance Campaign gained momentum with terrific snowball effect the settler authorities realised that they either had to adopt rigid anti-defiance measures or adapt themselves to changed conditions and capitulate unconditionally to the forces of liberation.

Because of their own criminal obstinacy, they chose the adoption of anti-defiance measures.  Having made their choice, their dilemma was that, that choice might add to their already heavy list of foul deeds, since any measures directed towards defiance could themselves be defied.
           
Towards the end of 1952 a settler decree toward the ending of defiance was proclaimed and gazetted.  It had been issued under the despotic powers wielded by the settler Governor-General in his capacity as “Supreme Chief” of the African people.  Such powers derived from the Native Administration Act of 1927.

At the beginning of 1953 the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Public Safety Act were passed.  They were measures to reinforce the 1952 decree.  Defiance was made a serious criminal offence.  A maximum of ten lashes and ten years imprisonment were authorized for its punishment.  The property of defiers could also be confiscated and a general or partial state of emergency could also be declared under which the settler authorities would more bluntly be a law unto themselves.
Under the threat of such stern measures, the Defiance Campaign petered out.  The basic need of the South African political situation thus became that of defying those anti-defiance measures.  And this is where Mangaliso came in.

Against heavy odds within and without the liberation movement the Africanist Movement, the seasoned hard core of the 1943 Youth League forged ahead.  Soon they became a force to reckon with.

In sport of the draconian measures they had already adopted and all the other advantages that they enjoyed, the settlers and their allies took alarm at the growth of the African movement.

Matters came to a head with the emergence of the Pan-Africanist Congress at the inaugural conference held in Orland on the 4th to 6th April, 1959 at which Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was elected President of the PAC and National Leader of the African People.

Settler-oriented African politicians out-settlered the settlers in their condemnation of the Africanists.  They dubbed them chauvinists and racialists.

As old war-horses, the Africanists had anticipated such manoeuvres and had provided for it.  The 1959 Pan-Africanist Manifesto was the only political document in South Africa that had gone out of its way to propound and expand a scientific philosophy of race.  That philosophy fully analysed the political implications of the race issue.

For the Africanist the world race can never have a plural when applied to human beings for the simple reason that they recognize only one race, the human race.

That philosophy completely refuted the allegations that they were racialists.  The primary political implications of the recognition of the only one human race lay in the fact that they recognised no unbridgeable biological differences among members of the human species.  For them therefore, the classification of various human groups or sub-groups as either inherently inferior or superior became meaningless.  The claim that the supposedly superior group had the right to rule over the supposedly inferior group therefore fell away.

The Africanist philosophy of politics itself refuted the allegation that they were chauvinists.  They could not be chauvinists or extreme patriots because politics for them is something much more than mere love of their country.  Politics for them is a struggle for the effective control of interests.  Recognised social theory and the dictate of the course of history alone determine where such control should reside.  Nationalism postulates that such control vests in the majority, and socialism that it vests in the workers.

If recognition of only one human race together with its political implications is a monstrous thing, it stands to reason that multi-racialism, recognition of many races, together with its political implications became a manifold monstrous thing.

Since the African people of South Africa are indigenous and are the majority the claim to rule rests on solid foundations.  The Africanists reject the idea that their fundamental right to rule is compromised by the fact that a handful of settlers have acquired a living space in their part of the continent.  They hold on writ of prescription can ever run against the fundamental rights of a people.
           
The Africanists pointed out that the idea of multi-racialism was really a convenient cover for a multitude of political sins.  The chief of these sins was the imposition upon Africans of a subtle but sinister settler orientation for the purpose of protecting white domination and perpetuating the slavery of the African people.

The Africanist philosophy on race and politics completely shattered the myth of their being chauvinists and racialists. 

The settler authorities themselves stumped the countryside breathing fire and brimstone upon the Africanists.
           
Dr. Alber Herzog, a settler minister and the son of the £10 donor to the I.C.U. funds condemned them as “the most poisonous agitators in the country.”  Mr. C. R. Swart, a colleague of his and then the South African settler Governor-General denounced them as “the most dangerous agitators.”  To reinforce his point Swart bough from the British eighty military Saracens for his already well-equipped para-military police force.  Swart is now President of the Republic of South Africa.

Mr. F. Erasmus, a War Minister, boasted openly about his army’s role of having to shoot the black masses.  Eric Louw, Foreign Minister, proclaimed from the house tops that the Africans would obtain their freedom only over the dead bodies of the settlers.

The entire settler and settler-oriented press demanded the heads of the Africanists on a platter of gold.

Mangaliso retorted: “We begin from the premise that the interests of the subjet African people and those of the ruling settler minority are inherently in conflict.  We are committed, and irrevocably committed, to upholding of the interests of the African people.  We would be naïve to expect any support from the settler or settler-oriented press, committed as they are to the upholding of settler interests.”

With characteristic simplicity he would also add: “We have said before and are saying so now: No press built us up no press can destroy us.”

The South African Bureau of Racial Affairs, a settler body whose very name bears the imprint of its racialist orientation decided to take a hand in the screening of the Africanists.

The Africanists recognised this step for the sinister move it was.  They knew SABRA as an influential body of supporters of the settler authorities.  Since, however, they were committed to meeting all comers they accepted the invitation for the interview.

Ten settler professors under the leadership of Professor Olivier of the University of Stellenbosch and Vice-Chairman of SABRA accordingly met six top Africanists under the leadership of Professor Sobukwe of the Witwatersrand University and leader of the Africanist movement.  The AFricanists crushed the case of the settler professor and demonstrated the superiority of their own case beyond reasonable doubt.  The screening became a damp squib.

With his vicious and malicious attacks upon the Pan-Africanists, Dr. Ambrose Reeves now ex-Bishop of Johannesburg, reveals the settler mentality at its worst.  In his otherwise monumental work “Shootings at Sharperville”, Dr. Reeves christens the Pan Africanist Congress the “Pan-African Congress.”  He dubs the Pan-Africanists themselves as “agitators and intimidators.”  He lays claim to knowing something at first hand of the rival policies of the ANC and PAC.

His Lordship claims to be “mystified” by the fact that the settler “authorities had allowed the Pan-Africanists, a powerful splinter group of the ANC to continue unchecked.”  He virtually invites the settler government to clamp down upon the Africanists.

He seems to be unmindful of the whole series of screening that had failed simply because of the inherent strength of the Pan-Africanist case for African rule.

He also seems to be unmindful of the position of inherent strength that the Africanists occupy.  The Africanists are irrevocably committed to upholding the interests of the African people and the African people alone can exercise their prerogative to allow or disallow them to function unchecked.

As deputy to the Publicity Secretary, it was never my pleasure or that of my colleague to supply his Lordship with Pac literature or with a guest-speaker for any occasion.  His sources of information therefore remain a mystery.

On Friday March 18, 1960, Mangaliso announced the plans of the first step of the campaign as the launching date.  The course of that campaign left no one in doubt that Mangaliso commands the fierce loyalty of African youth.

Accompanied by George Zwidi Siwisa, Chairman of the Rand Region and Vice-President of PAC, Zeph Lekwame Mothopeng, Judicial Affairs Secretary, Selby Temba Ndendane, Foreign Affairs Secretary, Potlako Kitchener Leballo, National Secretary, Matthew Nkoana, leading African journalist and many others, Mangaliso surrended himself at the Orland policy Station.

Z. B. Molete, Information and Publicity Secretary surrendered himself at Evaton at the head of 15,000 people on the same day as Abednego B. Ngcobo of Durban, National Treasurer.  Nearby at Sharperville Nyakale Tsolo surrendered himself at the head of 20,000 people.

National Executive Member Howard Ngcobo, Hughes Ndakane Hlashwayo, Economic Development Secretary and many others surrendered themselves in various centres of Natal.

In the Cape Province Elliot Mfaxa, National Organiser, C. J. Fazzi, National Executive Member, Phillip Kgosana, Cape Western Regional Secretary and many others surrendered themselves in various centres of the Cape.

Elias Ntloedibe, Pretoria-Pietersburg Regional Chairman and others surrendered in Pretoria.

Peter Molotsi, Pan African Affairs Secretary, Nan Mohomo, Cultural Affairs Secretary, and the writer had all been dispatched on secret missions on the eve of that campaign.
           
Each of Mangaliso’s apostles and disciples and followers went about their appointed tasks.  And the whole country became involved.  The savage massacres at Sharperville and Langa are already history.

Banning the Pan-Africanist Congress in his settler parliament Justice Minister Erasmus described it as “impossible.”  That was, in effect, the verdict upon its head Mangaliso Sobukwe.

On the date of the launching of that campaign the massacres that shook the world took place at Sharperville and Langa.  George Z. Siwiza died in harness at the “Blue Sky” Boksburg jail and Hughes Ngcobo in a motor accident after his release from jail.

The campaign plunged the Union of South Africa in the greatest crisis of its fifty years of existence.  Its reverberations are yet echoing and re-echoing throughout the world.
           
A five-month long official declaration of a “State of Emergency” followed, twenty-five thousand people were arrested, the country experienced its greatest economic dislocation, and South Africa was expelled from the Commonwealth as a result thereof.

Mangaliso also gained his point.  He proved beyond shadow of doubt hat political power vests in the liberation movement.  This grim reality confronts the settler authorities today.
           
The settlers now maintain themselves in office only through the use f naked organised mass violence.  The entire continent at the initiative of the Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah has condemned them unreservedly.  Their doom has already been proclaimed.  And they know it.  These brutal oppressors have now turned into savage mass murderers.

The condition of a stable government are that authority and power should reside in the same source.  With the emergence of a national government in South Africa that condition will have been fulfilled.

The African people of South Africa want freedom and independence now.  Mangaliso had told them that they will be free and independent.  And they believe him.

In quoting extensively from the new item and the viewpoint both of which appeared in the “Evening News” of May 5, 1960, the writer makes no apology.

Under the heading: “Abolition of Pass Laws: First step to Freedom”, the news item in the Accra “Evening News proceeds: “Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, former National President of the banned Pan-Africanist Congress, was convicted in the Johannesburg Regional Court yesterday of inciting Africans to support the campaign for the repeal of the Pass Laws.

“Kitchener Leballo, former National Secretary and other former Congress leaders were convicted on similar charges.

“Sobukwe had stated unequivocally that “the Pan-Africanist Congress has as its ultimate objective the overthrow of White Domination” in South Africa and the establishment of a non-racial democracy.  The abolition of the pass laws is the first step of that goal.

“Sobukwe asked the court to remember that the accused refused to plead because they felt no moral obligation to obey laws made by the white minority.  An unjust law could not be justly applied.”

Under the headline: “SOBUKWE MARCHES TO CALVARY” the “Evening News” states:

“Mangaliso Sobukwe, President of the militant Pan-Africanist Congress is on his way to calvary as Kwame Nkrumah of Africa did ten years ago.

“The Bandas and Lumumbas have served their turn.  Jomo Kenyatta still languishes in the chains of tortuous restriction to freedom of movement and action under the Union Jack.  Now it is the turn of Sobukwe.

“And the militant heart is facing the odds heroically in the name of the ashes of his father, the scores of Africans slaughtered like sheep in Sharperville and the vast struggle for the freedom and unity of Africa.
           
“Cry out, beloved country!  It shall not be in vain that daily, tears of Africa drivel their course in agony counting our dead and the groans in captivity, carving the names of our increasing martyrs on the heart that never forgets.”
“Walk boldly into captivity then, Sobukwe, millions of Africans and others of African descent all over the globe stand firmly behind you in your sufferings.
“The world watches in great sympathy as your intimate friend and brother Nkrumah supported by others, lifts up a stern finger of protest and the voice of action.

“South Africa represents to all the acme of the African tragedy, a caisson of long-suffering and the pent-up feelings of Africa, which once exploded will burn and drum in the hearts and ears of humanity till the last chain of oppression and apartheid is broken on the continent.”

Whatever the verdict of history upon Sobukwe, the man may be, the verdict upon Mangaliso the politician is inescapable: the proved himself equal to the role of defier of the undefiable.

From: The Voice of Africa [Accra, Ghana], June (?) 1960.