Department to honour struggle icon Sobukwe
THE NORTHERN Cape government’s 2018 provincial Human Rights Day celebrations will honour the founder of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.
The MEC for Sport, Arts and Culture, Bongiwe Mbinqo-Gigaba, will launch the revamping of Sobukwe’s office at the Mayibuye Precinct in Galeshewe tomorrow.
The event will take place under the theme “The year of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela: Promoting and deepening a human rights culture across society” and will also honour the 100th anniversary of the birth of former president Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela and Ma Nontsikelelo Albertina Sisulu.
The local event will be held at the Mayibuye Precinct next to Sobukwe’s office in Galeshewe.
Department of Sport, Arts and Culture spokesperson, Conrad Fortune, pointed out that March 21 had been declared Human Rights Day to remind South Africans about the sacrifices that accompanied the struggle for liberation and to celebrate the achievement of democracy in South Africa.
“The basis of Human Rights Day is attributed to the Sharpeville Massacre that took place on March 21, 1960, where the apartheid police shot and killed 69 people in a peaceful protest march against pass laws.”
This year also marks the 40th anniversary of Sobukwe’s death.
Sobukwe broke away from the ANC and formed the Pan African Congress in 1958.
As the president of the banned PAC, he was the first person against whom action was taken in terms of the General Laws Amendment Act and he served a three-year prison sentence for leading the pass law demonstration on March 21, 1960 (what became known as Sharpeville Day - now Human Rights Day). He had initiated the campaign by handing his pass to the police in Orlando and inviting arrest.
On his release from that sentence he was immediately re-arrested and sent to Robben Island where he spent six years in detention without trial.
In 1969 he was released from prison but was sent to Kimberley to live in a restricted zone comprising the magisterial area, moving into a house in Naledi Street, Galeshewe.
He was to stay home at night and in the magisterial district during the day. The reason he had been sent to Kimberley to live was so that he “should not live where he can with reasonable ease resume subversive activities.”
Another reason given was that there should be an opportunity for him to live and work and lead as normal a life in so far as this was compatible with the safety of the state.
He turned down an offer of a job in the Bantu Administration Department in Kimberley but became articled to an attorney in Galeshewe.
He was refused permission to leave the country in 1970 in order to attend Wisconsin University in the USA where he would have studied for a PhD in African Linguistics.
Professor Christiaan Barnard, the famous heart surgeon, operated on him in September 1977 at Groote Schuur for a malignancy on the bronchus (adeno carcinoma), also known as lung cancer. Barnard had requested that the apartheid authorities release him from his banning order to allow him to live his last few months with his family but it was refused.
Sobukwe returned to Kimberley on November 15, 1977 but was re-admitted to Groote Schuur on January 5, 1978. He died on February 27, 1978 and was buried in Graaff-Reinet on March 11, 1978.
His offices in Kimberley have deteriorated since his death, while his house is occupied by a family that moved in shortly after he died.
Tomorrow’s event will start at 10am.