DID YOU KNOW
Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was first mocked by his opponents in the debate between the Africanists and the Charterists and called a ‘Professor’ because they said he knows it all. He pulverised them with facts, cool and calm, with a smile.
Sobukwe had been a good student all his academic life, scoring As and being elected into the president of the Students Representative Council at the University College of Fort Hare. He was even head prefect at Lovedale College. His method of evidence based argument and sticking to the rubric often had his opponents floored down.
To neutralise him, the Speaker of the Transvaal Conference in 1958 gave him a task to count the votes for and against the adoption of the Charter. He dropped out of the counting exercise and took part in the debate swinging more than half of the hall to the Africanists.
His supporters adopted the honorific ‘Prof’ to encourage him and other Africanists intelligentsia to teach and enlighten those who were in the dark and exercised slave and colonial mentality.
The University of Witwatersrand refused to accept his teachings posthumously and confer professorship on him. He remains the people’s professor sixty years after resigning from Wits on 20 March 1960.
He turned the mock upside down. Those who mocked him were the ones who were eventually mocked.
The PAC had many learned individuals and organic intellectuals in the leadership since its inception. All of them refered to Sobukwe as ‘Prof’ and regarded him as the ‘defier of the undefiable.’ The wonderful son of the Batshweneng/Amamfene clan continues to be called ‘Prof.’
Breathing life into the flesh of the organization