Last week the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) issued a long overdue statement calling for a judicial inquest into the death of its founding president, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, who met his untimely demise in Kimberley on February 27 1978, at the age of 53. The statement is premised on the view that Sobukwe was a victim of a predetermined assassination, perpetrated systematically and cumulatively over the prolonged period of 18 years. Indeed, if there is one area that has received far less attention in the increasing body of writings on Sobukwe, it is the question of how he actually died.
In the statement, PAC president Mzwanele Nyhontso lists a litany of brutalities that Sobukwe suffered. These spanned the entire 18-year period that began in 1960 when he was sentenced to three years with hard labour for his role in leading the anti-pass campaign on March 21 1960; followed by another six years of illegal detention in solitary confinement on Robben Island from 1963 to 1969; and ultimately nine years of banishment to the township of Galeshewe in Kimberley, until his death in 1978. Nyhontso highlights Sobukwe’s isolation from other people, including fellow prisoners on the notorious penal colony of Robben Island; attempted murder through poisoning by serving him food containing pieces of glass and in other, unknown ways; illegal surgical operations and other procedures that were performed on him without the knowledge of his wife and family; and denial of adequate medical care (notwithstanding the gallant attempts by a few good doctors like Dr Fabian Ribeiro and Dr Solomon Lefakane, and several others).
His widow, Zondeni Veronica Sobukwe, who died on August 15 2018, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998 that Sobukwe began falling ill as far back as 1964, and at one stage he was operated on at Karl Bremer Hospital in Cape Town without her knowledge and “under a false name”. Particularly callous actions during the period of his banishment included interference with and orchestration of undue delays in his medical appointments by the security police while he was under banishment, and being repeatedly and contemptuously refused permission to travel outside the country to receive medical treatment such as when the African-American politician Andrew Young attempted to arrange for his travel to the US to receive such care. Sobukwe was also refused the opportunity to travel to take up an offer of employment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970, and a year later an application for an exit permit to travel to the same country in 1971 was perfunctorily denied.
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In spite of all this, Sobukwe’s tormentors failed to break his spirit and resolve, and in fact he was able to complete a degree in economics while on Robben Island and to pass the examination for law practice while under banishment in Kimberley. The extreme nature of these atrocities and their contribution to Sobukwe’s death call for a serious exercise of deconstructing the phenomenon of violent killing beyond being an obvious wanton act of brutality whose results are immediate or, if delayed, where the period before death strikes is not too long. The poignancy of the PAC’s statement lies in the fact that it raises the question of how and to what extent the death of a person as the result of a prolonged process of physical and psychological torture should be approached in the context of justice, recompense, reparation, or even retribution. Key questions that invariably arise in disassembling the constituent parts of the prolonged process of taking Sobukwe’s life are: Why did his captors choose this method of draining the life out of him instead of simply doing what most Gestapo-like regimes were wont to do, and create an “accident”, or even more crudely, simply gun him down?
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