Statecraft & Independence
Landmark
Robert Sobukwe
1924 – 1978
Founder of the Pan Africanist Congress
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the South Africa Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He founded the PAC and called the anti-pass campaign that ended at Sharpeville. The state then jailed him under a clause written for him alone, and renewed it every year.
Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was a lecturer in African languages at the University of the Witwatersrand and a formidable speaker, who broke with the African National Congress in 1959 over the Freedom Charter's declaration that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. He founded the Pan Africanist Congress on the argument that the land had been taken and that Africans should lead their own liberation without waiting to reassure anyone.
On 21 March 1960 he led the anti-pass campaign, walking to the police station at Orlando without his pass and inviting arrest. At Sharpeville the police fired on the crowd and killed sixty-nine people, most shot in the back. It is the day South African history turns on.
He was sentenced to three years. When the sentence expired in 1963 the government could not bring itself to release him, so parliament passed what became known as the Sobukwe Clause — a provision allowing his detention to be renewed annually by simple resolution, applied to no one else before or since. He spent six years alone on Robben Island, in a small house apart from the other prisoners, forbidden to speak to them; warders said the other inmates would sometimes hold up a handful of sand as he passed, meaning the land is still ours.
He was released in 1969 into banishment in Kimberley, banned, refused a passport, and watched. He qualified as an attorney and practised there until he died of lung cancer in 1978, aged fifty-three. He is the figure most often named when South Africans argue about what the transition did not settle.
On 21 March 1960 he led the anti-pass campaign, walking to the police station at Orlando without his pass and inviting arrest. At Sharpeville the police fired on the crowd and killed sixty-nine people, most shot in the back. It is the day South African history turns on.
He was sentenced to three years. When the sentence expired in 1963 the government could not bring itself to release him, so parliament passed what became known as the Sobukwe Clause — a provision allowing his detention to be renewed annually by simple resolution, applied to no one else before or since. He spent six years alone on Robben Island, in a small house apart from the other prisoners, forbidden to speak to them; warders said the other inmates would sometimes hold up a handful of sand as he passed, meaning the land is still ours.
He was released in 1969 into banishment in Kimberley, banned, refused a passport, and watched. He qualified as an attorney and practised there until he died of lung cancer in 1978, aged fifty-three. He is the figure most often named when South Africans argue about what the transition did not settle.
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