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Honour the 'Prof'
26/03/2007 08:43 - (SA)
Jon Qwelane
Sharpeville Day has come and gone, and very few of today's children have any idea of the great significance of March, 21, 1960, the day on which Boer policemen butchered 69 unarmed Africans protesting against the inhuman and unjust pass laws, and maimed hundreds more for life.
Instead, our children are being deliberately misled and brainwashed by the ruling crowd to forget Sharpeville and its meaning because their idea is to wipe away forever anything which keeps highlighting the important role played by the Pan-Africanist Congress in the fight against oppression and racialism.
The so-called Human Rights Day comes only a few days after the anniversary of the death of what I consider to be the greatest African yet born in this country, PAC founder and leader Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, the brilliant and hugely charismatic academic.
I have nothing against human rights per se, but it would have been more honest to have selected another day on the calendar to celebrate these rights.
As it is, Sobukwe's contribution to our history is deliberately being obliterated by those who wish to settle some dubious political scores, however meaningless.
I would argue that Sobukwe was much brighter and more intellectually gifted, and had maturity and more insight than the lot of them combined, and perhaps one rightly perceives a tinge of spite on their part.
Lead by example
"Prof" Sobukwe, a lecturer at Wits, always led from the front and by example.
On the day of the countrywide anti-pass protest, he led his followers on a defiant march from Mofolo in the west through Dube and Phefeni to Orlando Police Station in the east, not carrying his hated dompas and daring the police to arrest and imprison him.
Prof gave what, to my mind, is a timeless definition of an African: one who owes his or her loyalty to Africa and is prepared to live under majority African rule.
His definition has nothing to do with "race", meaning anybody can be an African provided they fulfil the twin conditions of owing loyalty to Africa and being prepared to live under majority African rule. More to the point, just possessing a "black" skin does not necessarily make one an African.
Prof's definition of an African eschewed "race", and he qualified it thus: "To us the word 'race' has no plural form; we believe in only one race -the human race."
To talk, therefore, about "multiracialism", as was fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, was anathema to Sobukwe and his followers, and they derided it as "racialism multiplied"; what was required, they asserted, was a non-racial society.
I suggest the best way to remember this great African would be to enshrine his name forever in a living monument such as a university (he was an educationalist), a major airport, a national highway or a major hospital.
The ruling Charterists, with just about everything selfishly named after them -Luthuli this, Mandela that, Tambo this, Hani that, Slovo this, Plaatje that and Mbeki this -are fully aware of Sobukwe's great significance and contribution, but they want to play their worthless and divisive game of politics.
The present version of the PAC would do us all a huge favour if it returned to the pure ideals of its founding president and embraced and lived them.
Jon Qwelane's column is published each week on News24, courtesy of Jon Qwelane and the editor of Sunday Sun, which originally carried the article.
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