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Darkest Before Dawn Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2025
Joe Thloloe was one of the founding members of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), having joined at the time of the November 1958 break with the African National Congress. Thloloe played a crucial part in the anti-pass campaign of 1960 which led to the Sharpeville Massacre and which resulted in his imprisonment. He was incarcerated first at Stoneyard Prison in Boksburg and then at the Stofberg Prison in the northern Free State, where, with fellow PAC detainees, he was exposed to many of the harshest disciplinary measures of the apartheid system. It was during prison that Thloloe turned to journalism.
After release, Thloloe worked at The World and then at the Rand Daily Mail as the first black journalist of the township edition; a second period of incarceration followed the Soweto Uprising in 1976. Thloloe was banned under the Suppression of Communism Act in 1981 and arrested and imprisoned several more times by the apartheid government. In 1988 Thloloe was appointed the managing editor of The Sowetan.
Thloloe served as chairman of the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) and president of the Union of Black Journalists and Media Workers Association of South Africa. He was the South African Press Ombudsman from August 2007 to January 2013. In 2012 he was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga for his contribution to the liberation struggle, literary writing and journalism.
Thloloe was a long-time associate of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, and it is his memories of Sobukwe and the early days of the PAC that form the focus of this interview, conducted in 2014.
Hook. Joe, you were a member of the PAC, if I understand correctly, very early on? 1959?
Thloloe. I joined in 1958, on the 2nd of November 1958. That's the day the Africanists broke away from the ANC.
Hook. What was the feeling among the PAC people at that time? I mean it must have been one of excitement and enthusiasm?
Thloloe. What had happened was that there was the Transvaal Congress of the ANC, and it started on the Friday night with Luthuli giving an address to the Congress.
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