Students want Fort Hare renamed
HUNDREDS OF PAC members marched to the University of Fort Hare yesterday, demanding that the university management rename the institution after its founding president Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.
The protest march coincided with the 39th anniversary of Sobukwe’s death. He died at Kimberley Hospital on February 27, 1978, after being banished to Number Six Naledi Street, in Galeshewe, in 1969.
In their memorandum, the PAC wrote that Sobukwe had declared in his 1949 address as the SRC president that Fort Hare “must be a barometer of African Thought”. According to the PAC:
The name of the University of Fort Hare must be changed as it continues to glorify the genocide and plunder of colonialism carried out against the African people.
The university must be called Mangaliso Sobukwe University as a recognition of the contribution played by this great son of the soil in the liberation of this country and the entire African continent.
The university must embrace and lead the call for the decolonisation of education particularly in Higher Education.
The university must reflect the values embodied by Mangaliso Sobukwe when he said: “True leadership demands complete subjugation of self, absolute honesty, integrity and uprightness of character, courage and fearlessness and, above all, a consuming love for one's people.”
This was the not the first time that a call has been made to give a national honour to Sobukwe. On December 13, 2012, Ilse Wilson, one of the daughters of ANC stalwart Bram Fischer, made a direct plea to President Jacob Zuma to honour Sobukwe.
At the time, Zuma had invited Wilson and her sister, Ruth Rice, to be part of the ceremony to rename the then Bloemfontein Airport to Bram Fischer International Airport in honour of their father – an astute lawyer who represented Nelson Mandela and others during the 1956 Treason Trial.
In her reply to the honour, Wilson surprised many when she said her father would have felt much better about the renaming of the Bloemfontein Airport if Kimberley were to bestow a similar honour on Sobukwe and rename its Kimberley Airport Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.
At the time, Zuma noted the request to rename Kimberley Airport, saying it was important to recognise all liberation heroes.
However, Kimberley Airport still has its colonial name almost five years later.
When the apartheid regime banished Sobukwe to Kimberley, the intention was to silence his influence in the political narrative. However, the residents of Kimberley, particularly students, embraced his ideology of Pan Africanism.
While in Kimberley, he was held under house arrest and not allowed to speak to more than one person at a time. When he went to church at the Centenary Methodist Church, where he was a lay preacher, police officers would be deployed there to ensure “Ntate”, as Sobukwe was affectionately known in Kimberley, did not deliver a political sermon against the apartheid regime.
While he was banned from continuing his duties as president of the PAC, he was not forbidden from using his legal practice in Kimberley to issue instructions to his successor Zeph Mothopeng.