The book Darkest Before Dawn, edited by Derek Hook and Leswin Laubscher, presents readers with a portrait of a formidable and principled figure in the struggle against colonialism and apartheid who has, so far, received less attention than he merits: Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.
In bringing together public and private documents, the book bridges the divide between the personal and the political to produce a rich and complex representation of Sobukwe in his own words.
The book is a collection of letters, speeches, articles, interviews and court testimonies, some previously unpublished, by Sobukwe. He was the founding president of South Africa’s Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), which broke from the African National Congress (ANC) in 1959. Sobukwe was a proponent of pan-Africanism and advocated for the return to African hands of land stolen during colonial conquest.
In 1960 he was convicted of incitement by the apartheid state for his role in the PAC’s anti-pass campaign. The campaign protested against the law that required Africans to carry pass books outside the reserves to which they were designated by the regime, making them effectively foreigners in South Africa.
The campaign culminated in the apartheid government’s massacre of protesters in Sharpeville in 1960.
Sobukwe was perhaps the apartheid regime’s most feared prisoner. He spent six years isolated from other prisoners on Robben Island. The island was a prison for black political prisoners during the colonial period and again from 1961 during apartheid. He was then banished to the Galeshewe district of Kimberley in the northern Cape until his death in 1978, aged 53.
My PhD thesis (unpublished) explored the relationship between Sobukwe and his friend Benjamin Pogrund, a Jewish journalist and liberal opponent of the apartheid regime. I have also explored the subject in a recent paper. In my view, Darkest Before Dawn shows that Sobukwe’s relationship to liberalism was more nuanced than has been historically stated.
Liberalism in South Africa
As Hook and Laubscher put it, to speak of Sobukwe today is to
join a series of debates … that have been alive in South Africa … since at least the 1940s.
One of these debates concerns liberalism. It is certainly true, as Darkest Before Dawn shows, that Sobukwe never called himself a liberal. By contrast he did claim to be a socialist. It is also true that he had much to say that was sharply critical of liberals and liberalism.
Here some context is necessary: at least as far back as the 1940s, stretching into the final decades of apartheid (and even sometimes today), the term “liberal” was an epithet for whites seen to be meddling in the political affairs of the oppressed black majority.
It included communists as much as it did members of the Liberal Party of South Africa. It was an objection to three things:
the habit of white anti-apartheid activists to impose their views on their black peers about the correct direction for the liberation struggle
the tradition of trusteeship established during British rule. Here the black man (to put it in the gendered language of those times) was to be the white man’s ward until he became civilised by “western” standards
the attitude of gradualism: that black people’s progress towards autonomy in their own affairs should happen in stages determined by the white man.
As a socialist and an Africanist, Sobukwe was also critical of the classical liberal defence of private property. When he criticised liberals or liberalism he was mostly taking aim at these things.
Sobukwe and liberalism
However, if you read both Sobukwe’s public and private correspondence, a much more ambiguous relationship to liberals and to liberalism emerges.
Firstly, there are his personal relationships with liberals. Some of these were amicable acquaintanceships, like those with parliamentarian Helen Suzman and Eulalie Stott, also an opponent of the apartheid regime and president of the Black Sash, a liberal non-violent resistance movement run by white women.
Others were much more profound relationships, such as those he shared with Benjamin Pogrund and Nell Marquard, an early member of the Liberal Party. To give the reader a hint of the depth of feeling in these relationships, I quote from two letters.
In letters to Pogrund, written from Robben Island, Sobukwe described his friend as doing more for him than he would have expected from
one who had shared the same womb with me.
He added that the word friend was “incongruous” in describing the depth of their bond.
Writing to Marquard from his banishment in Kimberley, Sobukwe concludes,
Keep well and remember that we love you very much. And that it is a pleasure loving someone like you.
Contrarian views
Having to do with liberals, even being friends with them, loving them deeply and saying so, does not of course make one a liberal. People can and do sustain relationships across ideological divides because they have other things in common. However, if we triangulate Sobukwe’s intimacies with liberals with other things he said and did, we find a man who had a more complex relationship to liberalism than might be expected.
He was open, for instance, to individual rights. This is significant because such a conception of rights is the hallmark of the liberal tradition. The Marxist critique of this commitment is that such rights under capitalism will be impossible to guarantee and that under communism they will follow automatically.
But historical experiments in communism have not always borne this out. Neither the Soviet Union nor the People’s Republic of China provided citizens with such rights. For instance, in his opening address to the PAC inaugural convention, delivered in Orlando, Soweto, the exclusively black residential area south-west of Johannesburg, in 1959, Sobukwe said:
We guarantee no minority rights, because we think in terms of individuals, not groups.
An openness to and an appreciation of individual freedom is also woven throughout Sobukwe’s letters to Pogrund (in the book Lie on Your Wounds) together with a staunch opposition to the authoritarianism that characterised both apartheid and the communism of Sobukwe’s day.
Sobukwe commends himself to Pogrund in various places by proudly relating anecdotes about his refusal to go along with the herd, and frequently styles himself in anti-authoritarian and even contrarian terms.
Ambivalence and ambiguity
Scholars and the reading public owe a debt of gratitude to the editors for their work in this collection. It includes a thoughtful introduction and a concluding chapter that explores the different ways that scholars and activists have represented Sobukwe in the present. Detailed and informative footnotes run throughout the book.
One document that is absent from the collection, and that I think should have been included, is the notes from Pogrund’s three-day interview with Sobukwe on Robben Island in 1964, for his project on the influence of communism on “non-white politics” in South Africa. These are only available in the University of the Witwatersrand’s Historical Papers Research Archive. The document sheds some light on Sobukwe’s attitude to communism.
There is enough evidence, both in Darkest before Dawn and Lie on Your Wounds, to say that Sobukwe’s relationship to liberalism was at the very least an ambiguous one. This matters for at least two reasons.
Firstly, because it is a contentious aspect of the legacy that Sobukwe has bequeathed us that has so far not been seriously studied. Secondly, against the backdrop of recent and pathbreaking scholarship that is charting the relationship between a liberal tradition that is interested not just in securing negative individual freedoms, but also the substantive freedoms associated with socio-economic justice, and socialism, Sobukwe may have something to offer us.
