The growing demands for Robert Sobukwe’s legacy to be more foregrounded speaks to the shifting trends of consciousness among South African people. This year’s commemoration of March 21 to reflect the killing of black people in Sharpeville coincided with the national shutdown organised by the EFF.
People began to reflect about their living conditions since democracy began and the ultimate price paid by the more than 69 heroes and heroines who perished on that Monday afternoon in 1960.
Very little is known about that day. Part of this is a result of how apartheid as a crime against humanity is heavily minimised, distorted, ridiculed, denied and romanticised today. This is evident in the language of corporate media, the government and the liberal education system.
For instance, the government calls March 21 Human Rights Day. This erases the actual weight and significance of the day and brushes over the fact that hundreds of black families lost their loved ones on that day.
In essence, March 21 left an entire nation of black people traumatised and this trauma is being passed on from one generation to the next. This trauma was not addressed, the white perpetrators were not held accountable, no reparations were requested or paid, and black people are still a dehumanised race living with zero dignity today.
In other words, black people lost so much from March 21 and they are still losing a lot. There is, therefore, nothing to celebrate about the killing of black people. History curriculums in schools and universities are also deeply depoliticised. Related disciplines such as economics, sociology, engineering and languages also do not go into detail about critical moments of struggle in our country such as Sharpeville and the intellectual contributions of Robert Sobukwe and the Pan-Africanist Congress.
Our education system is structured to respond to market-orientated convictions of SA and the world. Students and learners are being prepared for the globalisation of modern development, not for the complex problems facing their communities.
The language of free trade, profit maximisation and individual prominence and fame is being embraced in the curricula of schools more than social solidarity, critical consciousness and service to humanity.
Universities are closing down history departments to replace them with more short-term business management courses in order to attract higher profits, elite enrolments and status.
In fact, more is mentioned in schools about the nation state of SA as a recent post-1994 product of Mandela’s heroic adventure – and less is said about the African continent and the role of its African people to liberate SA.
It is possible for anyone in SA to study history all the way up to a PhD without coming across Robert Sobukwe’s seminal work in the decolonisation movement of Africa in the 1960s.
There is little investment in education for the purpose of excavating black history, women’s contributions and the complicity of white corporate SA in apartheid crimes - in order for the nation to begin having more productive conversations about reparations and true justice.
Sharpeville, therefore, was a product of the political consciousness work done by Sobukwe and his collective in black communities across SA. Sobukwe was a scholar activist, a lecturer, a political organiser of the oppressed and an outstanding commissar who could influence, shape and concretise a people’s imaginative aspirations about their future.
Sobukwe wanted to unite and rally the African people on the basis of African nationalism. He wanted Africans to think, create, develop, govern and build as a people in their own way without being lectured by anybody in their own land.
Sobukwe’s mission was to build a single united Africa that will recognise the primacy of the material and spiritual interest of the human personality – a human race.
Today we must therefore refuse to allow the legacy of this towering intellectual of the 20th century to just vanish. His work was rich, intergenerational and inspirational.
We must emulate the Sharpeville movement as well by throwing away the dompasses and chains of today’s miseducation and build a popular front of black consciousness rooted in communities to self-educate ourselves towards a true liberation.
*** Dr Pedro Mzileni is a sociology lecturer at the University of the Free State
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