Listening to What Sobukwe has to Say: 99 years after his birth

Lindokuhle Patiwe

Yesterday, the 5th of December 2023 marked 99 years since the birth of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe. One of the best Pan Africanist scholars to come out of Azania and the first President of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC). His organization, the PAC, celebrated this milestone with an event in Nelson Mandela Bay which also served as the launch of its yearlong Sobukwe centenary celebrations, as 2024 will mark 100 since Sobukwe’s birth.

Sobukwe’s 99th birthday happens at a time when the country is at a crossroads. There is crisis everywhere. The state has effectively abdicated its duty as a state. Almost all the key services that are the prerogative of the state have been taken over by the private sector. On Security, neighborhoods rely more on private security than the police. On healthcare: the minute one can afford private healthcare, as expensive as it is, they rather choose to go private than to risk going to a public hospital or clinic, the same goes with education. To a point where the private school industry has grown so big that it no longer caters for the upper middle class only, new private schools that cater to the lower middle class are propping up everywhere. When there is a disaster in the country, we look to the Gift of the Givers and other non-governmental organizations for relief than the state. In almost all our needs as citizens, resources permitting, we rather choose the private sector than the state.

Our people have also finally reached a stage where they acknowledge that the ANC is probably not the right custodian for our collective interests in the state. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. The crisis that we find ourselves in has led to a rise in right wing discourse in the country.  Several right-wing organizations are springing up everywhere claiming that they can save us from the ANC morass we find ourselves in. If it is not Operation Dudula and Operation Dudula lights putting the blame squarely at the door of fellow poor Africans, it is neo-liberal organisations like ActionSA or Rise Mzantsi’s claiming that a further deep into neoliberal policies will save the day. Not to mention the Western Cape Separatist movement who seem to claim that the problem is having blacks in power. I cannot help but remember the Italian Scholar, Antonio Gramsci’s, statement: “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

It is, therefore, apt to take the opportunity to ask the question; how can one of the greatest political thinkers the country has produced help us navigate the situation we are in? As we celebrate Sobukwe’s 99th birthday, let us take time to look back at his ideas and ask ourselves the question; how can these ideas help us negotiate the situation we are in? Is African Nationalism still a viable option for South Africa and the continent?

In the recent past, there have been some within the BCPA block who have initiated a project called “finding Sobukwe’s voice”. This project is aimed at looking for video or audio recordings of Robert Sobukwe. This, of cause, is a noble gesture, but I think that we do have Sobukwe’s voice, its just that we have not been listening attentively enough. Sobukwe’s voice shouts loudly through his writings, it echoes through the young and defiant voices of the #MustFall generation. We just haven’t been listening. I would like to us to use his 99th birthday as an opportunity to really listen to what Sobukwe has to say. In this essay, I attempt to do just that. To listen to what Sobukwe has to say about the situation of Africa today and this crime scene we call South Africa.

At the international front, there is momentum in the Global geopolitical politics. There seems to be consensus among countries of the Global South that the United State dominated unipolar international system needs to change. The increasing appetite for BRICS shows that there is an appetite for a multipolar international order. This has led to a revisiting of the claim made by Fukuyamists at the end of the last century that we have reached the end of history. It seems that society is entering yet another stage in world history now. Fukuyamists are forced to either prove how this moment is just a different manifestation of the last stage of Neoliberal capitalism that came in after the fall of the Berlin wall or admit that indeed they were wrong to quickly close the book of world history, another story is yet to come.

Though, the rise of BRICS has been characterized as a move to a multipolar international system, in reality, however, it seems as though that the shift away from the West is not a shift that seeks to redistribute power across the globe but to shift as enough power to the East as possible that there can once more be a balance between the powers of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc. Again, Africa seems to be a dependent agent that will move according to the global balance of forces. Africa is not making her own independent claim to the changing Global geopolitics. This is where Sobukwe’s ideas of African Nationalism become instrumental.

In the Africanist Manifesto of 1959, the Africanist make the following claim about Africanism:

“Africanism is Pan Africanist in scope, purpose and direction. It is a social force that constitute the third social force in the world. It serves the material, intellectual and spiritual interest of Africa, and does not in any way serve the spiritual interest of either the Eastern or the Western Powers” (Africanist Manifesto, 1959).

The claim by the Africanists here is that Africa must create its own path, independently of any global forces that are active in the global geopolitics. This means that as much as BRICS is a welcome intervention in the current geopolitics, the African continent must still chart its own path and not move according to the global balance of forces, it must be an active actor in the movement of balance of forces and not only a reactive agent. This is something that seems to have been missed in the current public discourse from the left on the new potentialities brought about the rising power of BRICS.

Sobukwe, in his opening address to the inaugural congress of the PAC argued that the position of Africa on the international scene should the one articulated by the Kenyan revolutionary, Tom Mboya, which argues that “it is not the intention of African States to change one master(Western imperialism) for another (Soviet Hegemony). This point has been missed precisely because, I argue, we have not paid enough attention to the ideas of Sobukwe and the Azanian School’s interpretation of African Nationalism. This claim; that Africa must make her own contribution, must not, at least I want to argue, be read within the Western teleological order. I’m not claiming that society, in order to fulfill its dialectical march towards its final synthesis, Africa must make her claim. I’m not that committed to the Western linear teleology. I am, however, arguing that this is a potentiality available to Africa, and for Africa to avoid the situation of being an agent acted upon by global balance of forces and be an active agent in those global balance of forces, it is a potentiality it must actualize.

In the domestic front, while we all recognize that there is a crisis, we do not all share the same views on the source of the crisis and the panacea for it.  Many of those that have “taken a stand” against the crisis, locate the crisis at the level of lack of leadership and corruption. Almost all the movements that have grown momentum within the public imagery of South Africa’s public discourse claim that the problem that South Africa is facing is corruption and lack of leadership. Gayton Mckenzie and his Patriotic Alliance say we have a government that lacks a backbone and fears so-called foreigners and does not care for coloured people. Herman Mashaba and ActionSA say that we have a corrupt ANC that only loots and does not follow fundamental principles of the Free-Market economy and Rise Mzantsi argues that we have a corrupt leadership that lacks new ideas on how to find ways to make the Free-Market economy work for the marginalized (Don’t know if they know anyone who has managed to make neoliberal policies work for the poor). But all of them share the same fundamental base; there is nothing wrong with South Africa, we just need to save it from the ANC. We have a wide variety of Sipho Pityana’s Save South Africa movement, just dispersed to serve the different South African demographics. Gayton Mckenzie, bring in the coloureds, Mashaba; bring us the blacks who think that there is potential that they can be capitalists, Songezo Zibi; bring us the young NGO people who lack any politics beyond providing for immediate relief to communities and are tired of speaking from the margins. What these different movement all share is the same mandate, to save South Africa. The only thing that separates them is the different constituencies they each appeal to.

If we were to listen carefully to Sobukwe’s voice however, we would realise that while we have a corrupt ANC that must be removed from government as soon as possible, the primary problem faced by our country is South Africa itself. South Africa remains the primary ethical problem and we are in this crisis precisely because we have not yet resolved this problem. If we took Sobukwe seriously, we would say to the likes of Zibi, that “NO. South Africa MUST NOT RISE. It Must Fall, and it is our collective duty to accelerate its fall”.  

Sobukwe must constantly be our reminder of the primary contradiction in South Africa. We must keep his name and ideas alive not just for the sake of reminding people that there were other political leaders outside of Mandela. Quite frankly, if that is the reason, we remember Sobukwe, we should save him, and forget him. We must save him from the tendency to reduce African intellectuals to their biography. Rather he be forgotten if our memory of him does not equally evoke the memory of his ideas. The remembering of Sobukwe must also be the remembering of the original sin in South Africa. The land. The source of the African unfreedom in occupied Azania is the dispossession of the land. Therefore, the possibility condition of freedom for the African in occupied Azania is the return of the land.

South Africa, as a political imaginary, through the Freedom Charter’s incorporation into the South African Constitution, sold off this possibility condition for our freedom as African People. South Africa, as a political imaginary, necessarily, robs the African people of their birth right to the land and invisibilises the dispossession of the African people.  It legitimizes white settlers’ dispossession of African people of their land through the unjust wars of colonialism.

The 1994 democratic breakthrough did not resolve this primary problematic in Occupied Azania. As Ndumiso Dladla in his Here is a Table shows, the 1994 represent another moment in the continued unfreedom of the African people in Occupied Azania. Many have argued that in 1994 ‘freedom’ was conferred, not fought for, and as Fanon reminds us that freedom conferred is no freedom at all. In the section on The black man and Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks Fanon asserts:

“But the black man does not know the price of Freedom because he has never fought for it.

From time to time he has fought for liberty and justice, but its always white liberty and a white justice, in other words, for values secreted by his masters” ([emphasis mine] Fanon, 2008:195).

This is because “as Master, the white man (in 1994) told the black man: “you are now free” (Fanon, 2008: 195), the slave was recognized without struggle. It is no surprise then, that the South African imaginary, even when faced with a crisis, cannot think beyond South Africa, its values are white values, it cannot think beyond white values because, as Fanon argues in that important footnote in the section on The Black man and Hegel, instead of turning of turning away from the master, the black colonized slave in South Africa runs straight to the master, he does not seek recognition from the master, he wants to be the master. In 1994, we did not destroy the Master’s values and structure, we sought incorporation into them, an impossible task. This is why there is still this obsession with saving South Africa, the South African public discourse fails to understand that South Africa is an impossible project for the black, it can never deliver freedom for the black object and give it subjecthood.

Yes, this is Fanon’s Kojevian (mis)reading of Hegel, but we argue that Fanon’s critique applies to even the ‘undiluted’ Hegel, the Hegel that seeks death of the other, not recognition. In both Hegel’s, Freedom cannot be conferred by the other on the subject.  In both Hegel’s the life-death struggle is key. In Hegel, the struggle for freedom qua self-consciousness must be fought for by consciousness itself. It must prove its independence to itself. It cannot outsource this task. This is why the Africanists say “We are our own liberators”. We cannot attain freedom if we are acted upon. This is why the bondsman in Hegel turns towards the object and away from the master, through work on the object it regains its independence, it is no longer acted on, it acts upon.

In South Africa, the primary contradiction is land dispossession. The land is the possibility condition of our freedom. Sobukwe and his comrades realized that the struggle for land is that which will bring back the lost freedom from the African. Maqoma, Hintsa, Dingani, Moshoeshoe and Bambatha, did not seek recognition from the Settler, they wanted their land back, land dispossession was the cause of their unfreedom, it, in the same breath become the possibility condition for their freedom. By saying that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”, the birth right of the African is auctioned away and they become deprived of their possibility condition for their freedom.

We have been acted upon; our freedom is not our own, but the freedom of the Settler Master. It is he who dictates to us the values of society. It is for this reason that in the South African public discourse, we are unable to see beyond corruption as the fundamental problem in South Africa, to do that would put at risk the precarious position of the Settler Master in South Africa. Consciousness does not voluntarily self-alienate; it constantly seeks self-preservation through the negation of the other. The South African collective consciousness is white settler consciousness. It is not in its interest to expose itself and incriminate itself to the crime of South Africa. Hence all our problems must be put at the doorsteps of ANC corruption. In this way it hides its hand in the crime of South Africa.

Everything that is wrong with South Africa can be put squarely on the doorsteps of white settler colonialism. Even ANC’s corruption itself. The ANC is a typical example of what Fanon talks about in The Pitfalls of National Consciousness; Nigel Gibson goes as far as to say that one would swear that Fanon was analysing post 1994 South African when he wrote about the National bourgeoisie in that famous chapter.  While this comparison between the ANC and Fanon’s analysis of the National Bourgeoisie of the post colony has been made ad nauseum in South African political literature, what has been virtually missing has been the acknowledgement that this parasitic class that Fanon warns us against is a product of the colonial situation itself.  So, our critique of the ANC’s parasitic nature must not in anyway be done in a way that absolves white power from the problem. The ANC is a product of white power in South Africa. The National bourgeoisie class that is epitomized by the ANC is a necessary by product of colonialism and a particular brand of African Nationalism, the African Nationalism of what some of us from the Azanian school call, the South African school. The kind of African Nationalism that was adopted in 1955 with the Freedom Charter, necessarily gives rise to the phenomenon of the parasitic national bourgeois class we see in the ANC today. In other words, the ANC is necessary product of South Africa as a political imaginary. Therefore, any attempts at saving South Africa, will, of necessity, give rise to this parasitic class. The problem is not just the ANC, it is South Africa itself as a political imaginary.

The South African School of thought’s Nationalism is a nationalism that does not have contradictions with Capitalism. Remember the National Democratic Revolution’s two stage theory? The basic argument of the two-stage theory of the NDR is that the ANC, as a bourgeois national movement does not have a contradiction with capitalism, so they diverge with the SACP here, but converge in their common enemy of colonialism. Therefore, the SACP, even though it has the goal of ultimate communism, can work with the ANC in the attainment of the bourgeois National Democratic Order, and after the attainment of this first objective go on its own for the attainment of a socialist order. Therefore, the South African school’s version of African Nationalism is inherently bound to have this parasitic national bourgeois class precisely because it is not against colonialism and capitalism at the same time. In a weird logic, capitalism and colonialism to this school are two separate phenomena and one can be saved while the other is done away with.

Sobukwe’s version of African Nationalism is different. To Sobukwe and the Africanists, one cannot separate colonialism and capitalism. Thus, a fight against colonialism, must, of necessity, be a fight against capitalism because, while these two may play pretend at being two separate phenomena, are inseparable to a point that to call them two different phenomena is a bit problematic. It is one problematic that manifests itself differently in space-time. Hosea Jaffe called it the Holy Trinity of Europe, Capitalist-Colonialism and Racism.

In the chain of reaction section of the Africanist Manifesto, this is what the Africanists say;

“The significant portion of our social milieu begins with the expansion of the markets founded by the rising commercial capital of Western Europe at the turn of the fifteenth century. Succeeding years witnessed the “discovery” of new lands by the Europeans, the Papal award of the whole of Africa to the Portuguese, increased European slave raids on Africa, denuded Africa of Africans and led to the establishment in the Americas of the greatest mass chattel slavery the world has ever known. Africa had been successfully robbed of Africans. It was this chattel slavery that contributed substantially to the initiation of the European industrial revolution which in turn resulted in the unleashing of the chain of reaction which culminated in the rape of Africa and the close of the last century” (Africanist Manifesto, 1959).

It is clear for the Africanists that one cannot separate capitalism from slavery and colonialism. This is one phenomenon revealing itself differently in space and time. Therefore, the African Nationalism of Sobukwe is a Nationalism that, just like Fanon, calls for a blocking of the rise of the National Bourgeoisie stage in the decolonial revolution. Part of the problem of many South African critics of African Nationalism is that they take for granted the ANC version of African Nationalism and once they have successfully, or at least think they have, critiqued that version, that critique is uncritically taken to apply to all versions of African Nationalism[1]. We are hopeful, however, that a master’s thesis that is currently being cooked at the university by the mountain will soon clear the confusion for us in this regard.

If we listen to Sobukwe, it becomes clear that the crisis we face today, is not just a crisis of a corrupt ANC, it is a necessary result of the South African political imaginary. We must at all time, reveal the invisible hand of White Settler power in South Africa. And we would also recognize that the problem does not need “new ideas”, we need to just take seriously those ideas that have come long before us by the likes of Sobukwe. The crisis must remind us that we need to break with South Africa and build Azania. We should remember that South Africa remains a crime scene a crime created by White Setter colonialism and is perpetuated through our failure to resolve the original sin.

In paying tribute to Sobukwe we must, just like Fanon told his comrades “…the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe”, we must remind fellow Africans in occupied Azania that the South African game is over, we have nothing to gain from South Africa, our energies must not be wasted in saving it, we have an Azania to build. South Africa Must Fall for Azania to Rise.  

[1] If we are fair to them though, they probably are not even aware that there are contending versions to begin with. The ANC version, to them, is not the standard version, it is the only version of African Nationalism.