The Afterlife of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe

Summary

Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe's name has begun to appear with increasing frequency in South Africa today. To cite just one prominent example: the Robben Island Museum declared 2023 the year of Robert Sobukwe. What is it, then, that underlies the growing public interest in the figure of Sobukwe? Why this renewed enthusiasm for a man whose political and intellectual legacy has remained dormant for the better part of the last four decades? The question that the famous Jamaican-British cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (1996, 12–13) posed more than twenty-five years ago in respect of the decolonial theorist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon deserves to be recast in contemporary South Africa, asked in respect of this fellow opponent of the colonial order: ‘Why Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe? Why today?’

This, to be sure, is not a line of questioning concerned exclusively with Sobukwe himself. It is an enquiry also into the particular social and political circumstances of the contemporary post-apartheid era; it is a questioning, furthermore, of the emerging – or re-emerging – conditions of political desire that have occasioned this revitalisation of Sobukwe's memory. Sobukwe, as powerful political image, as historical legacy, as icon of the struggle against white supremacy, as a profound identification with African Nationalism and Pan-Africanism, is representative of a great many political aspirations. In pursuing the above line of questioning (Why Sobukwe? Why today?) we should therefore remember that multiple constituencies call upon Sobukwe, that what Sobukwe has come to stand for might differ in some important respects from what is contained in the biographical narrative, the details of the historical persona, or indeed Sobukwe's own speeches and writings contained in earlier parts of this book. There are many portrayals of Sobukwe, many uses made of his legacy, and to survey a cross-section of these depictions and utilisations of Sobukwe, as we do, does not mean that they all cohere or even that they all need to be agreed upon. Having paraphrased Stuart Hall once, we can do so again: ‘Rather than trying to recapture the “true” [Sobukwe], we must try and engage the after-life of [Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe]’ (Hall 1996, 14).