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ABSTRACT
Using material both from Sobukwe’s well-known public addresses and from his lesser known private letters to his friend the liberal journalist Benjamin Pogrund, this article argues that Sobukwe is best regarded as a radical non-racialist who regarded race in anti-essentialist terms and sought to unmake the material, social and political conditions that give rise to it. It also explores the unmaking of race at the ordinary and everyday level.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the National Institite of the Humanities and Social Sciences for the financial support of the doctoral project on which this article is based.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I say regrettably because South Africa is the name the union of former colonies gave themselves in 1910. This union consolidated white settler power so it names a racist entity and should, in my view, be changed. Because no consensus exists on an alternative I use South Africa in this article, but reluctantly so. It is not clear what Sobukwe would have called South Africa. He himself did not suggest Azania or indicate particular approval of it. See correspondence from Robert Sobukwe to Benjamin Pogrund, 5 February 1967, Ba5.11, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
2 I am aware that when one departs from the documentary record and ventures into the personal lives of intellectuals and activists one finds a variety of ideas about non-racialism and practices to realise it in daily life that complicate the picture in which a serious commitment to non-racialism was the preserve of the NEUM or PAC (see Raymond Suttner Citation2012).
3 Mohamed Adikhari (Citation2005) points out that the non-racialism of the NEUM and related bodies such as the New Era Fellowship really only became uncompromisingly and consistently non-racial in the 1960s during a period of dormancy in which strategy counted less and they were more able to refuse to make ideological concessions.
4 I give examples to support this proposition below in my discussion of the “national question”.
5 This shouldn’t be a controversial statement to make as Sobukwe publicly declared himself a non-racialist. Jon Soske (Citation2015: 23) writes, “Sobukwe told the Golden City Post: ‘We reject multi-racialism in favour of a non-racial democracy because multi-racialism suggests a maintenance of racial groups’”.
6 Chris Saunders (Citation2012: 297) gives examples of much more racially essentialist discourse from PAC members in speeches given in Cape Town in the early 1960s.
7 The Freedom Charter, AD1137-Ea6-1-001, Federation of Sout African Women Records, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
8 The Forum Club was a regrouping of members of the Fourth International Organization of South Africa, after the latter group disbanded in the wake of the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 (see Baruch Hirson Citation1989).
9 In an earlier speech in 1949 at the Completer’s Social at Forte Hare University, Sobukwe had not included Coloureds among the foreign minorities of South Africa (see Gerhart Citation1978: 184). He appears, from the Gerhart interview cited above, to have later shifted on this question.
10 Correspondence from Robert Sobukwe to Benjamin Pogrund, 3 January 1966, Robert Sobukwe Papers, Historical Research Papers Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
11 Correspondence from Robert Sobukwe to Benjamin Pogrund, 1 March 1967, Ba5.17, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
12 Correspondence from Benjamin Pogrund to Robert Sobukwe, 16 March 1967, Ba5.20, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
13 Correspondence from Robert Sobukwe to Benjamin Pogrund, 12 April 1967, Ba5.24, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
14 Soske evolves vis-à-vis his characterization of the PAC’s non-racialism. Astute readers will notice that in his earlier work (cited above) he characterizes their non-racialism as “adventitious”.