The timely City Press article by Benzi Ka-Soko on Sunday, 15 July 2018, titled “Affirming Sobukwe’s Legacy Is Imperative”, is an excellent and timely intervention in acknowledging Sobukwe’s towering, yet concealed and obscured, role in the Azanian (South Africa) liberation struggle, both as a political ideologue, an intellectual and a philosopher par excellence. 

On 28 April 2018, a day after Freedom Day, 90 years old struggle stalwart and anti-apartheid activist affectionately known as the “Mother of Azania”, Mama Zondeni Veronica Sobukwe, will be awarded the Order of Luthuli: Silver by South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, at the Sefako Makgatho Presidential Guest House in Pretoria. Her son and the Executive Director at the Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe Trust, Dini Sobukwe, will receive the award on her behalf due to old age.

Post-1994 South Africa has a theatrical crisis of selective amnesia and partisan remembering of history. History telling, whether at school, university, in the media or public celebrations and commemorative events, is biased towards a singular political trajectory and one particular school of thought that is portrayed as the sole agents of the socio-economic and political transformations that have apparently occurred in the past 24 years. 

Mama Sobukwe epitomises the collective experiences of many Black women throughout the Afrikan continent and diaspora whose roles and contributions in the liberation struggle remain unacknowledged, written out of popular historical narratives, biographical memory and national consciousness.

There are many distortions in the dominant narratives around the 1976 students’ uprising. One of the most critical of these is the persistent, subtle projection of that uprising as the exclusive initiative of young men, to the complete exclusion and erasure of the invaluable contributions and sacrifices of young women. This constitutes epistemic violence against Black women.