Robert Sobukwe

Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe was born in Graaff-Reinet, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, on the fifth of December 1924. A gifted student aided by the Methodist mission, he studied at Healdtown and then at the University of Fort Hare, the sole college then open to Black South Africans, where he was elected president of the Students' Representative Council and first raised his voice against injustice.

He went on to teach Zulu and Xhosa in the languages program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, earning the affectionate name "The Prof." Convinced that South Africa's future belonged to a united African people, he broke with the African National Congress and, on the fourth of April 1959, helped found the Pan-Africanist Congress, becoming its first president.

On the twenty-first of March 1960, he led a disciplined, non-violent protest against the pass laws, presenting himself for arrest at Orlando. That same day the Sharpeville massacre stunned the world. Sobukwe was sentenced to three years; when his term ended, Parliament passed the renewable "Sobukwe Clause," a provision used against him alone, holding him in isolation on Robben Island until 1969.

Released into banishment and banning in Kimberley, he studied law and quietly built a practice while barred from speaking or gathering. He died there of cancer on the twenty-seventh of February 1978. Feared by the powerful for the clarity of his conviction, Robert Sobukwe remains a sovereign conscience of African freedom, honored wherever dignity refuses to bow.