Publications
Partners
She was a freedom fighter; a nurse. And like many mothers and wives of the apartheid era, she supported her family while her husband was targeted by the authorities.
Zondeni Veronica Sobukwe, the widow of Pan-African Congress founder and leader Robert Sobukwe, died at the age of 91 in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
PAC secretary-general Narius Moloto told City Press that although the party was saddened by her death, it was happy and proud of her role that she played in the liberation movement.
“She was at her home in Graaff-Reinet when she passed away. She supported Sobukwe through and through, when he was in prison and on Robben Island. She was always behind him. When her husband was unemployed, she was a professional nurse and she supported the family,” Moloto said.
Zondeni and Robert Sobukwe met in Standerton, when Zondeni was still a student nurse and Robert was a teacher. They were married in 1954.
Robert, who was a staunch believer in non-racialism and often criticised the politics of the ANC, was charged with incitement following a protest march that was held in 1960 to the Orlando Police Station.
The PAC was marching against the pass laws that were put in place by the apartheid government. Robert was sentenced to three years in prison, followed by a period of solitary confinement on Robben Island.
Known as the Mother of Azania, Zondeni was left penniless and relied on pension grants from the government for her survival.
She testified at the 1997 Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the role that the government had played in her husband’s death, when they denied him medical care. She spoke about glass that had been put into his food and said she wanted answers from the doctors who had examined him.
Moloto said that funeral arrangements were under way.
“We still need to meet with the family so the details will be communicated when arrangements have been made,” Moloto said.
In 2003, the late writer and activist Es’kia Mphahlele penned a tribute poem in honour of Zondeni at the Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe Memorial Lecture which was held at Fort Hare University.
A Great Woman
Es’kia Mphahlele
March 25, 2003
I see through the window of my mind
millennia upon millennia of African women:
droves and droves of them
have walked this earth and toiled
babies on their backs, clay pots, firewood
on their heads.
And when the red and the pink locusts
swarmed our lands savaging
every blade and every acre and leaf of it,
stripping us naked.
We attacked.
When the reds and the pinks
gunned us down
wrung our necks in the noose of their civilisation---
that is when we lost our innocence.
In our time a man was born
to this nation
Mangaliso Sobukwe.
He had a dream that would not let him be---
amid so much pain, so much longing,
so much history dripping
centuries of blood
the heavens themselves must have screamed:
a dream to seek and restore
that sense of ourselves
that proclaims a people’s selfhood
echoing from hill to hill down the ages
from rim to rim of this planet.
You were there with Mangaliso,
Mother Veronica
ever ready for him to draw the vigour,
succour from the family warmth that
only one can know in his woman’s
embrace a million million times reassuring.
You were there with him,
Daughter of Africa ,
at the banging and clanging of prison doors and gates,
there in the busy wards where your man
lay listening to the ravaging beat of his pain.
The ebb of the flow of life
from a body
always waiting for someone’s paper work,
someone counting time for a man’s life
he would never grasp.
You had been there to witness it all---
man fixed on a course
to set black humanity free:
a man breasting the hills
and breaking his feet on rocky road
from college to stockade to the end of his life.
Then at last, daughter of Mathe,
the sun came out of you
and your children
blazing from above the eastern skyline
lighting your way
through the darkness of your journey.
Always you were reminded this---
that no-one in all of savage Christiandom
could break your man’s mind or spirit,
or trample on sanctity of your home---
divine gift of the Supreme One
attended by the ancestors.
We salute you,
Daughter of Africa
devoted wife and mother
who turned pain into an ever-glowing shrine
the full shadow of your man
on the wall above your head while you pray.
And look, children of Africa---
the soothing modesty of that
Sobukwe smile leading defiant crowds:
Not riding tanks of fire but
pushing frontiers of courage, faith,
a people’s love---
the smile that speaks in many tongues!
You were always there,
Mama Sobukwe, waiting.
The sun, our elders teach us,
Shines on all of us, Mama,
Bears no envy nor spite for anyone.
