The theme for this year’s lecture, to be delivered by Judge Dumisa Ntsebeza, is the historic, albeit perennially exasperating, quest for African integration and African unity with specific focus on the lessons of the conflict in Darfur in Sudan.

Judge Ntsebeza is eminently placed to pronounce on the subject as he was recently nominated by the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, to be part of a five-person UN commission of international jurists to assess the scale and implications of the Darfur crisis.

The theme of African unity and integration also resonates very closely with Sobukwe’s legacy. As Archbishop Njongongkulu stated in the Second Annual Sobukwe Lecture: “Sobukwe was devoted to the idea of (African) unity. Together with Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere and many others, Sobukwe can be said to be one of the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism.”

The ideal of Pan-Africanism finds contemporary resonance in President Mbeki’s abiding passion for the African Renaissance – the notion that Africans have to synergise their political, social and economic energies on a continental scale to ensure an optimal development trajectory in a globalised and competitive 21st century.

The conventional thinking in political science on integration is that it is essentially the “elimination of conflicts and antagonisms” and “the development of solidarities”.

But integration is not an issue of the niceties of diplomatic protocol. It is not some ideal that can be declared, signed and delivered by a handful of leaders.

It has to be developed through involvement and the common experience of all Africans, as integration is both a horizontal and vertical process.

It is horizontal when it concerns the inter-ethnic conflicts and antagonisms. This calls for a cohesive community and the rise in the level of harmonious social interaction among members of territorially segregated cultural, linguistic and racial groups.

It is vertical when it concerns the elite-mass gap. Integration occurs vertically in the process of bridging the gap. Integration is a process. It occurs in space. Political integration is a dynamic process of learning to live in peaceful co-existence with those we define as the “other”. This academic description is generally compatible with Sobukwe’s frame of reference.

ROBERT Mangaliso Sobukwe was born in Graaff Reinet in 1924 into the poverty that was the prevailing condition of the overwhelming masses of the African majority.

His father, Hubert, of Sotho extraction, was a lay minister in the Methodist Church and the fact that the church paid different stipends to black and white ministers was not lost on the young Sobukwe.

His mother, Angelina, was of the amaMpondo of the Eastern Cape.

By the time he arrived at the University of Fort Hare (UFH) in 1947, via the obligatory formative experience at Healdtown College, where he delivered the valedictorian speech on black-white cooperation in his final year, Sobukwe had fairly established ideas on the nature of racial oppression in the segregationist and apartheid-colonial South African state.

He excelled at UFH with the chairman of the Fort Hare Youth League commenting that “(Sobukwe) is by far the most brilliant fellow we have at college at the moment, and it is doubtful if Fort Hare will get the likes of him in the foreseeable future. The boy is a thinker and scholar and has full command of the English language”.

He immersed himself in the African nationalist debates then in full currency at the institution and which assumed an added urgency with the virulence of apartheid oppression after 1948.

With his speech as SRC president to the graduating class of 1949 Sobukwe left his historic footprint on the institution as well as placing himself in what was increasingly being labeled the “Africanist” tendency in the ANC – an alliance of fiery nationalists who rejected white and communist influence on the ANC.

About Sobukwe’s Africanism, Es’kia Mphahlele, on the occasion of delivering the Inaugural Sobukwe Memorial Lecture, said: “Sobukwe advanced the teachings of Anton Lembede and AP Mda far beyond the reaches of their imaginations, thus giving the concept of an ‘Africanist consciousness’ contemporary meaning. It became inseparably tied up with our humanity.”

After graduating from Fort Hare, Sobukwe taught briefly in Standerton, where he played a low profile role as an ANC member. He was subsequently appointed as a language instructor at the prestigious, liberal University of Witwatersrand (Wits) in 1954 with glowing recommendations from the dean of African intellectuals, Professor ZK Matthews, and Professor GM Mzamane.

Sobukwe and his family moved into Mofolo location, where the status of teaching at Wits thrust him into the upper echelons of the black middle class. It also gave him a certain degree of influence in the black community.

His home in Mofolo township became a focal point for meetings of the local ANC branch and Sobukwe emerged as a leader of the Africanists in the ANC.

But in the face of the relative security that his position at Wits afforded him and his family, Sobukwe’s political activities were increasingly placing him on an inevitable life-long collision course with the apartheid regime.

In the aftermath of the Congress of the People and the publication of the Freedom Charter in 1955, with which the Africanists had fundamental ideological differences, they inevitably broke away from the ANC in 1959 to form the Pan African Congress with Sobukwe as the organisation’s first president.

He resigned from Wits to devote his full attention to the activities of the PAC and led the anti-pass campaign that resulted in the Sharpeville massacre of March 21, 1960. He was arrested and imprisoned for three years.

This was extended by a further six years by the General Laws Amendment Act, the so-called “Sobukwe Clause” as it was specifically promulgated to keep him behind bars through annual renewal of his incarceration.

On his release Sobukwe was confined to Galeshewe township in Kimberley where, in spite of stringent banning orders, he continued to consult with political activists including a brilliant medical student who was to become the iconic symbol and martyr of the Black Consciousness Movement, namely, Steve Bantu Biko. Sobukwe succumbed to cancer in 1978 in Galeshewe and is survived by his wife Veronica Zodwa and four children.

Sobukwe’s legacy has currency at two significant levels: his definition of an African as anyone who owes a primary and total loyalty to Africa irrespective of colour or creed is consonant with the inclusive and reconciliatory genius of democratic South Africa’s Constitution that speaks to a common non-racial citizenship.

The liberatory precept of a common humanity that is surely a desired social ideal of democratic South Africa is described by Archbishop Ndungane as follows: “Self-hatred fuels hatred of others. So white people, as well as black, have benefited from Africans learning their own worth. While I think of myself as ‘nothing but a black’ I will regard all white people as ‘nothing but whites’ – all the same and all oppressive. But if I think of myself as a human being of high quality like all human beings – and also black – I will see white people as human beings first – and also white.”

In this way, argues Archbishop Ndungane, Sobukwe through his Africanist philosophy, and similarly, Steve Biko with the Black Consciousness philosophy, have contributed to the culture of liberation pervasive in South Africa.

The renewed rigour in the discourse on Pan-Africanism represents a second area of currency of the Sobukwe legacy.

In this regard Xolela Mangcu wrote in 2003: “Twenty-five years after his death Robert Sobukwe’s ideas have been vindicated by the current discourse on Africa’s renewal.

“Fifty years after Sobukwe sounded the clarion call for a Pan African identity, we are all, black and white, young and old, in official and unofficial everyday expressions, beginning to find our role in the broader African narrative.

“Through processes such as the African Union or the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), African leaders are attempting to give practical substance to Sobukwe’s call.”

Sobukwe’s ideas thus remain with us in the public domain and it is a challenge to social scientists, ancillary academics, organic intellectuals, public intellectuals and others to engage the discourse on race, ethnicity, identity, citizenship, representivity as an instrument to consolidate the social fabric of African society in the 21st century.

Professor John Hendricks is dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities and Professor Jide Oloyede is the director of the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Fort Hare.