This book, comprising approximately 300 letters, provides access to the voice of Robert Sobukwe via the single most poignant resource of Sobukwe's voice that exists: his prison letters. Not only do the
letters evince Sobukwe's storytelling abilities, they convey the
complexity of a man who defied easy categorization. More than this:
they are testimony both to the desolate conditions of his
imprisonment and to Sobukwe's unbending commitment to the cause of
African liberation.
The memory of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, inspirational political leader and first President of the Pan-Africanist Congress, has been sadly neglected in post-apartheid South Africa. In 1960, Sobukwe led the Anti-Pass Protests, which culminated in the Sharpeville Massacre, which proved a crucial turning point in the eventual demise of apartheid. Nevertheless, Sobukwe - a man once thought to hold greater promise for the
liberation of South Africa than even Nelson Mandela - has been consistently marginalised in histories of the liberation struggle.
Jailed for nine years, including a six-year period of near complete solitary confinement on Robben Island, Sobukwe was silenced
throughout his life, a condition that has been extended into the
post-apartheid present, so much so that we can say that Sobukwe was
better known during rather than after apartheid. Given Sobukwe's
antagonistic relations both to white liberalism and to the African
National Congress (whom he felt had betrayed the principles of
African Nationalism), it is unsurprising that he has been subjected
to a 'consensus of forgetting'.
With the changing political climate
of recent years, the decline of the African National Congress's
hegemonic hold on power, the re-emergence of Black Consciousness
and Africanist political discourse, the growth of student protests,
Sobukwe is being looked to once again.
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