Anti-apartheid activist: Robert Sobukwe, leader of the Pan Africanist Congress, in his cell at the prison on Robben Island. Derek Hook and Leswin Laubscher’s book Darkest Before Dawn tells the story of the years after his release. Photo: Getty Images
At first glance, to draw a line from Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) founder Robert Sobukwe to the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) as putative political heir seems an easy one. There are both historical and ideological or principled parallels. Both organisations were, after all, born of Youth League breakaways from the ANC.
These breakaways were, moreover, inspired by many of the same reasons. Just as the PAC decried the ANC’s adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955, so — the parallel can be drawn — the EFF expressed its disdain for many aspects of the Constitution of the “new” South Africa ratified in 1996.
In both cases the ANC was charged with conceding far too much to the beneficiaries of white supremacy, including, as we have seen, the crucial issue of the land […].
Moreover, the EFF’s professed pan-Africanism, like its prioritisation of land expropriation and its repeated references to the needs of the rural and dispossessed poor, calls to mind Sobukwe’s legacy. So does the populism that both parties aspired to.
Things are, however, more complex than such easy parallels or appropriations permit. In fact, the relationship between Sobukwe and the EFF is complex and deserves more sustained reflection than is possible here.
Nevertheless, a few provisional comments are in order. Firstly, for all the parallels listed above (and several more we have not mentioned), it is curious that Sobukwe has, only fairly rarely, been cited in any explicit way by the EFF’s leadership, at least publicly.
Back in 2014 then EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu, for example, cites Malema as saying: “The EFF is a movement in a class struggle and appreciates its congress, black consciousness, pan-Africanist and … socialist character … in the struggle for economic freedom in a neo-colonial South Africa… We are uniting Chris Hani, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko and Che Guevara in the struggle for economic freedom.” [In August this year Shivambu left the EFF for the MK Party.]
Truth be told, one is more likely to hear an inspirational appeal to anti-colonial Afro-Caribbean intellectual Frantz Fanon than to Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe. There is perhaps an obvious reason for this — Sobukwe’s name is intimately associated with the PAC, and invoking him thus runs the risk of losing votes to a rival political party.
There is also a clear clash of values in the comparison between the autocratic leadership style of Julius Malema and Sobukwe’s own repeated insistence on the transitory and strictly secondary role of political leaders relative to that of the people themselves.
Indeed, it seems impossible to reconcile Sobukwe’s foreswearing of personal gains and his pronounced distaste for wealth with the alleged corruption and the conspicuous displays of consumption that Malema and associated EFF leaders have been so infamously associated with.
This comparison can be underscored by referring to scholar-writer-philosopher Achille Mbembe’s characterisation of Malema as embodying a South African form of lumpen radicalism, which Mbembe defines as “a political tradition of unruliness … in which fantasies of male power, control and desire have always been deeply entangled with ‘war envy’ and an … insatiable appetite for money, luxuries and women”.
While this may not, of course, be a fair reflection of the broader political culture of the EFF — one might be accused of conflating criticism of Malema with criticism of the EFF as a whole — it nevertheless suggests a stark contrast with Sobukwe’s PAC, with its strict disciplinary codes, its emphasis on the necessary sacrifice of leaders and its commitment in its disciplinary code that “members deport themselves with honour, dignity … proper decorum … and show a true respect for African womanhood”.
It is surely significant also that some of the most vocal advocates of a return to Sobukwe’s political ideals — take the cases of writer and political commentator Malaika wa Azania and former EFF MP Andile Mngxitama — have become disillusioned with (or, in Mngxitama’s case, expelled from) the EFF.
This seems an indication that a different order of decolonising aspirations is perhaps to be found elsewhere, outside party politics generally and outside the political culture of the EFF more particularly.
Speaking about the student protests (particularly Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall) that swept across South Africa in 2015, Mbembe (2016) notes the following: “We have a generation of young people who are no longer willing to accept the national narrative as it has been constructed since 1994, meaning around key values of racial reconciliation, market economy, non-racialism and so forth. It’s a generation of people who are more and more convinced that they have been sold a lie …
“And they are determined to put on the table some of the questions we have put under the carpet for a long time — questions of property and ownership, questions of democratisation of access, questions of whiteness, and fairness.
“All those difficult issues we have not tackled enough, they are willing to bring them to the open, sharpen the antagonisms and get them resolved. And that shift, that cultural shift it seems to me, is much more important than anything else, and it signals a new form of politics.”
Commentator Ayabonga Cawe (2016) draws on PAC ideas — and by extension on Sobukwe — in his analysis of the student protests sweeping across South Africa in 2015 under the banner of Rhodes Must Fall: “The articulation of ‘transformation’ as a solution has found its most fervent critics among the youth, who are calling rather for ‘decolonisation’. The project of decolonisation pursued by the youth is a project rooted in a particular understanding of racism and the colonial enterprise.
“It is an acknowledgement that the individual acts of racism occur in a world that affirms white supremacy … as a norm … Remedial action involves not only deterring people from being racist, but actually subverting the power relations that allow for such a situation in the first place. Such subversion requires, at a minimum, the resolution of the historic antagonism between blacks and whites in South Africa; the land.
“It is also an understanding that the resolution of the skewed property relations in South Africa including but not limited to land, without a political, cultural and pedagogic project centred on pan-Africanism and black consciousness will not suffice.”
Mbembe’s mention of a “new form of politics” is worth stressing. This consideration, along with several other factors — the rejection of a constructed national narrative and “questions of democratisation of access” — clearly overlaps with Cawe’s analysis, particularly the latter’s emphatic distinction between the agendas of decolonisation and transformation.
Sobukwe operates here as a symbol for a counter-institutional decolonising impulse. This is not, of course, to confine the multiple aims and objectives of the various student protests to the signifier Sobukwe alone […].
It is, however, to assert that Sobukwe becomes one prospective name for a more encompassing project of decolonisation which extends beyond the given political and institutional structures of the post-apartheid condition. This fits with historical characterisations that underline a utopian dimension to Sobukwe’s thought, and that identify him not as a pragmatic political organiser or figurehead but as a visionary, intellectual and moral leader, a practitioner of politics not — as philosophy scholar Terblanche Delport (2016) puts it — as the art of the possible, but precisely as the art of the impossible.
This, then, is a crucial part of what Sobukwe stands for today: decolonisation. And decolonisation understood not in a restricted or domesticated form (as the outcome of negotiated settlements, in the form of institutional concessions, and so on), but decolonisation as a mode of subjectivity and culture, decolonisation as a pervasive condition of political desire.
Hook and Laubscher are scholars and authors. Darkest Before Dawn is published by Wits University Press. Note: The book was written before the recent departure of some EFF leaders from the party.