Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe

Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (1924-1978), South African nationalist leader and a founder of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). He joined the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANC) while still a student at the University of Fort Hare, in Alice, in what is now Eastern Cape province. In 1952, when teaching in Standerton, in present-day Mpumalanga province, he was dismissed for his participation in the ANC's Defiance Campaign against apartheid, the South African government's system of racial separation. He then obtained a post at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg teaching in the Bantu studies department.

Sobukwe became increasingly politically militant and broke with the ANC in 1958. In 1959 he was one of the founders of the PAC, and he served as its first president. He argued that blacks should not rely upon white allies. The PAC appealed to black nationalism, and, in contrast to the ANC, it saw the future South Africa as a black rather than a multiracial state.

Sobukwe organized nationwide demonstrations against the restrictive pass laws on March 21, 1960. During the demonstration in the township of Sharpeville, police panicked and fired on the demonstrators, killing 69 blacks. Sobukwe and other leaders were arrested; the PAC and the ANC were banned; and Sobukwe was sentenced to three years in jail. At the end of his three-year term he was not released but was transferred to the maximum-security prison at Robben Island. The government was so fearful of his influence that a special legal amendment known as the “Sobukwe clause” was passed in order to make it possible to jail him indefinitely without trial, which the government did for the next six years. There were widespread international protests at this treatment. In 1969 Sobukwe was released but was put under a banning order, meaning he was restricted to his home area of Kimberley, in what is now Northern Cape province. He was not allowed to attend meetings, and he could not be quoted anywhere in South Africa. Sobukwe spent his last years practicing law in Kimberley.