Philosopher Sobukwe had lessons we didn’t learn

The revolutionary Robert Sobukwe never called the masses into some stadium to ask them to clap hands for his rhetoric speech and then ask them to go home – he rather called them to battle for freedom.

He never used the poor, desperate and landless masses to parade and flex his quantitative strength in public. Nor did he present himself as a messiah. He was not concerned with being important, with being a hero, or making concessions with the enemy to avoid personal victimisation.

No, he fearlessly led from the front in the people’s struggles and became an inspiration to that very African he wanted to see. He faced the gun head-on without having a gun and looked the full wrath of the invading apartheid colonialist thieves in the face without blinking.

He called out the illegitimate colonial courts and reminded them that they had no jurisdiction over him.

Importantly, he taught Africans that the whole oppressive system depended for its existence on their submission to it, on their fear of it. And he taught that the freedom of the whole world rests on the freedom of the dispossessed Africans.

He would have still certainly taught workers today the same thing: to fight for freedom. But his understanding of the consequences of fighting for freedom was most noteworthy. He said: “The price of freedom is tears, toil, and blood.” And he paid with his own life.

Sobukwe was a philosopher, ideologue, and theoretician par excellence. His ammunition was a revolutionary philosophy and theory, method of struggle, and ultimate ideological vision.

Indeed, transformation is a pipe dream, a hollow proposition by “screeching megaphones” of loud talkers precisely because they begin from the race question, not the interests which protect racism. Racism is protected by economic power which was preserved in the sell-out and screwed-up deal which lead to the corrupted and undemocratic elections in 1994.

Fundamentally, to Sobukwe, race had no “plural” form – all humans were equal. But the “race myth” he says, was “propounded and propagated by the imperialists and colonists from Europe”.

Importantly, the myth was accepted in 1955 by the oppressed through the intervention of their [mis] leaders. It took the form of multi-racialism. Rather, in the eyes of Sobukwe, multi-racialism was a magic wand of the Charterists essentially to preserve racism. As Sobukwe puts it: “Multi-racialism is, in fact, a pandering to European bigotry and arrogance. It is a method of safeguarding white interests irrespective of population figures … transporting to the new Africa these very antagonisms.”

And so the Charterists did transport these antagonisms. Black Economic Empowerment and Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment, and all affirmative action policies tell us the transportation of the group antagonisms was successful.

Some ignorant political idiots accused both Sobukwe and the Pan Africanist Congress of being racist, of wanting to throw white people into the sea. Yet, Sobukwe had taught explicitly against the doctrine of hatred. He spoke of an African in terms of loyalty, not race.

If we had listened to Sobukwe, we would have no farcical rainbow-nation, no fake TRC, no false “unity in diversity”, no landlessness, and certainly no black or white race constructs.

We would have known politics are not ideologically neutral. And, thanks to Sobukwe, we know that fact.

Lunga X Mantashe.

• Mantashe is deputy president of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.