A HIGHER ORDER
Mrs Sobukwe needs to be honoured
TODAY, one day after Freedom Day, the 90-year-old struggle stalwart and antiapartheid activist affectionately known as the “Mother of Azania”, Mama Zondeni Veronica Sobukwe, will be awarded the Order of Luthuli: Silver, by President Cyril Ramaphosa in Pretoria.
Her son and the executive director at the Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe Trust (RMST), Dini Sobukwe, will accept the award on her behalf due to her age.
Significantly, Mama Sobukwe receives this long-overdue honour exactly 40 years after the death, under banishment, of her husband, the founding president of the PanAfricanist Congress of Azania (PAC) and liberation philosopher par excellence, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.
It is also one day after South Africa celebrated 24 years of democracy.
This is the first time the South African government is recognising and honouring Mama Sobukwe.
In a statement released on Thursday the Chancellor of the National Orders and director-general in the Presidency, Cassius Lubisi, said the president had decided to honour Mama Sobukwe with the Order of Luthuli: Silver for her “tenacious call for freedom of the people, service to the community and steadfast support of incarcerated freedom fighters”.
But the ANC government is not honouring Mama Sobukwe out of their own volition or because it has had a change of heart towards Sobukwe’s widow or Sobukwe’s legacy.
The time taken to award Mama Sobukwe is a shameful indictment of a government that is structurally biased and selective about whose contributions and legacies it celebrates and whose memories it remembers.
For the past 25 years this government has rendered Mama Sobukwe irrelevant and non-existent, systematically erasing her from the collective national memory and public discourse on South African women liberation heroines and struggle stalwarts.
Mama Sobukwe is receiving this national order award from the Presidency because of the unwavering and diligent efforts of young activists from the Blackhouse Kollective who last year nominated her to receive the highest national honour in recognition of her unsung role in the fight against white supremacy.
Beyond nominating Mama Sobukwe as a recipient of the national order, the Blackhouse Kollective further wrote to the Presidency proposing the institution of a completely new national order named after her and dedicated to outstanding women who have made selfless sacrifices and contributed immensely in creating a just and equal society.
This proposal to the Presidency challenged the current patriarchal constitution and fabric of the national orders, reminding the President and his advisory council that of all the national orders which currently exist, none is specifically dedicated to recognising the specific contributions of women in effecting change in society and restoring people to their true humanity.
There is no national order or award named after a woman; instead, of the six national orders currently in existence, two are named after men: Albert Luthuli and Oliver Reginald Tambo.
This speaks to the patriarchal dominance of male narratives which inherently obliterate women from national memory and consciousness.
Not a single monument exists in this country in honour of Mama Sobukwe – surely this is no oversight. She represents a group of liberation stalwarts who have been erased and wiped from the collective memory and consciousness of the nation.
Ostracised from popular public narratives, Mama Sobukwe lives in her humble home in Graaff-Reinet with her children and grandchildren, the broader community of Masizakhe township who form part of her family.
Nevertheless countless individuals visit her to pay their respects and salute a living legend. Indeed, as the scriptures tell us, “a prophet is not without honour, except in his own hometown and in his own home”.
Mama Sobukwe has not been well honoured in her own land. As a nation we have rather subjected her to further trauma and pain by relegating her legacy and contributions to insignificance, too irrelevant to ever mention, let alone celebrate.
In doing so we, the so-called free and democratic nation that we claim to be, have been more evil to her than ever imaginable.
We are a nation that has never taken a moment to celebrate the contributions of ordinary citizens in the struggle for total liberation and the overthrow of white supremacy, let alone ordinary women such as Mama Sobukwe who have to this day steadfastly remained PanAfricanist in outlook.
At 90 years old, yet still going silently strong with profound diligence and quiet dignity, Mama Sobukwe is a living testament to the inferior status and position that society reserves for women both in biographical and historical narratives, as well as in our collective social imagination.
She is not celebrated simply because she is not a member of the ruling party.
What a tragedy for the nation and for posterity. It is a tragedy of contemporary injustices that we perpetuate collectively against our very own people through omission, exclusion, marginalisation, erasure and silencing.
In a neo-colonialist country where patriarchy and misogyny are institutionalised and normalised, instituting a new national order named after and dedicated to a woman struggle stalwart – an individual aligned to the ANC – would have set a supreme precedent to honour silenced and forgotten women and their experiences while they are still alive.
Mama Sobukwe is a symbol and a part of that greater collective of all those women; a living ancestor in our midst. Guilty of perpetuating epistemic violence against women, this government has missed a lifetime opportunity of genuinely celebrating women by not instituting the proposed new national order.
Whilst the award bestowed on Mama Sobukwe is well-deserved, it is an honour that is far too little, far too late.
This award bestowed upon Mama Sobukwe raises critical questions about the meaning of honour in South Africa, feminine honour versus masculine honour, and how we choose to honour, not only the elite and popular struggle stalwarts, but ordinary citizens and agents of societal change in our midst, women in particular.
This honour exposes our national shame in forgetting our heroines.
Mama Sobukwe is a practical philosopher whose life is a testimony to her philosophy of selfless service to the people and sacrifice for the nation; a sage who did not become part of the struggle for the sake of selfish benefit and personal gain, but for the genuine cause of freedom.
She has outstood the test of time, outshone her adversaries and outlived many of her contemporaries.
It was Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe who said: “Africa never forgets… These martyrs of freedom, these young and budding women will be remembered and honoured when Africa comes into her own.”
Indeed, when Africa comes into her own, Mama Sobukwe’s name and indelible memory – and those of many, many other forgotten women – will be remembered and bestowed with the highest honour in the land she fought and sacrificed her life for.. Those who have sought to blot out her memory and legacy should hang their heads in shame.