Jaki Seroke

Xuma was eventually defeated at the 1949 Bloemfontein conference, and a programme of action was adopted – sponsored by the Congress Youth League.

Sobukwe had played his bit part in these developments.

He was the president of the Student Representative Council at Fort Hare and AP Mda, of the Congress Youth League, had taken him under his fold for further mentorship. His basic drafting skills were utilised in the programme of action proposal document.

In Standerton, where Sobukwe taught at a high school, he was expelled for taking part in the Defiance Campaign in 1952. The students and community staged protests demanding his comeback. He then took a tutor’s position in African languages at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Senior leaders who were concerned with the downward slide of struggle morale with Dr James Sebe Moroka in the ANC presidency, and with his sudden decision to terminate the Defiance Campaign, asked Sobukwe to edit The Africanist, a political journal, in his spare time.

Mass action

The Africanists held fierce internal policy debates with the Charterists – who promoted the Kliptown Charter – from 1955 until the breakaway in November 1958. In April 1959, Sobukwe became the founding president of the Pan Africanist Congress.

He lifted the bar and raised the standards in quality leadership of the liberation movement.

He spoke of mass action to push for transformation and explained that mere demonstrations and pickets were ineffectual. Positive action of peaceful civil disobedience to make the system of oppression unworkable was the route to take. He said the leaders must be at the forefront of that mass action and lead by example.

At the 1958 All Africa Conference, hosted by Ghana’s then-new president and a leading pan-africanist, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, a target was set to free Africa from the vice-grip of settler colonialism and foreign domination by 1963.

Sobukwe built his rolling campaign of positive action against the pass laws, to fill up the jails and cripple the economy, with the 1963 target as a momentum to fuel mass participation in the struggle.

The Sharpeville Massacre on March 1960 then happened. South Africa and its resistance movement was never going to be the same again. The paradigm shift was planned, implemented and led by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and his able leadership in the PAC.

On March 30, Albert Luthuli, president of the ANC; Duma Nokwe, secretary-general, and a host of others took pictures of themselves burning their pass books.

They posed for photos like modern-day celebrities. This hypocrisy incensed Sobukwe – then in prison and facing charges of incitement and treason – for they had earlier attacked his strategy for March 21, where PAC branch leaders, with the backing of their communities, would demand imprisonment at police stations for not carrying their pass books.

The ANC leaders had seen this as amateurish and that it was doomed to fail before it even started.

They were now stealing the thunder. This small matter drove a wedge between the leaders of the struggle. It was exploited by outsiders observing the developments of the struggle. Sobukwe was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. In

May 1963, through the special “Sobukwe Clause” attached to the General Law Amendment

Act, which allowed for indefinite detention without trial, the whites-only parliament kept him, in particular, in detention and solitary confinement on the Robben Island maximum security prison.

Sobukwe was the only known persona non grata. He was kept apart from other prisoners, in isolation, and allowed to wear his own civilian clothes. He studied for an economics degree with the London University. Other political prisoners were serving terms on Robben Island prison.

An insurrection of poor peasants and working people identified as followers of Sobukwe had armed themselves with rudimentary weapons and started attacks on sell-outs and targets in white communities.

The country was very tense and on the brink of collapse as a result of this mass-based conflict.

In October 1964, Chief Albert Luthuli was conferred with