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Fittingly described by the now-departed doyen of African thought Es’kia Mphahlele as “a great woman”, Veronica Sobukwe (91) was a self-effacing but strong personality who brooked no nonsense about what matters most in the cause of serving the African people.
Ma Prof, as young Africanists following Robert Sobukwe fondly called her, was a disciplinarian who always strived to match thought, word and deed symmetrically.
She had no time for tomfoolery. She meant what she said and said what she meant.
She held a deep distrust for frivolous media attention on herself, because of the hardships she was going through after March 21 1960 (Sharpeville).
It was a crucible time that would put any character to the test.
She consciously intended not to cave in from the applied pressure of security police harassment and intimidation.
Just as her husband had said “not until the day of the resurrection” would he change his commitment to the Pan Africanist cause.
The racist colonial-settler regime meant to destroy her commitment to her husband by making endless year-on-year detentions without trial on Robben Island maximum prison.
She understood the greater goal to break her down so as to nullify the mission of struggle to overcome white domination, as espoused by the Pan Africanist Congress.
She held steadfast to the strategic political intent, up to the day she was taken to her final resting place – booked beside the grave of her loving husband.
After the funeral of Sobukwe in 1978 in Graaff-Reinet, she was summarily thrown out of number 6 Naledi Street, Galeshewe, in Kimberley, to where the family was banished in 1969.
She was homeless.
She sought refuge at her husband’s family home in Masizakhe township in Graaff-Reinet. Masizakhe is historically among the first four townships established for supply of cheap labour to white rule in South Africa and Graaff-Reinet is the citadel of Afrikaner nationalism in the Karoo midlands.
Her four children – then teenagers – were in boarding schools in Lesotho and Botswana. The eldest were taken by US congress ambassador at the UN Andrew Young for further studies in the US.
The isolation made her stronger rather than the intended ruin of her morale.
She mellowed in old age. She had a fantastic memory and remembered minute details of past events and people.
Lately, she told those who cared to listen, that she was among the last of the founders of the PAC.
This she stated on a Mother’s Day visit in May 2018 by a top-level leadership delegation led by PAC president Narius Moloto.
Her stories regaled me when we started in earnest to collate material for a pictorial biography on Sobukwe – a coffee table book project for the Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe Trust.
She kept an open-door policy for all at her humble home in Stockenstroom Street in Graaff-Reinet.
If you were born in Soweto between 1955 and 1963 she would say she probably did midwifery at your birth.
Lybon Mabasa and Ishmael Mkhabela, founders of the Azanian People’s Organisation, were her favourite sons – for rising to the occasion when she needed help most.
She respected Dr Mangosuthu Buthelezi as a family friend, despite the incident at Sobukwe’s funeral when militant youths demanded that he leave.
She adored ANC Women’s League president Bathabile Dlamini.
The Sobukwe house was an African home for all of us – whatever your persuasion.
She was an emancipated woman; politically aware of the contending forces in society and her own place in that struggle.
She was the eldest daughter of the Mathe family of Hlobane in KwaZulu-Natal.
She told me of her survival in Alexandra – the dark city of the 1940s – where gangsters ruled the streets. She protected her younger sisters with her streetwise interpersonal skills.
Arguably, Veronica Sobukwe lived not under the shadow and high esteem of Robert Sobukwe. She lived side by side, but was tied to the hip with him figuratively.
She will be sorely missed.
The PAC is deeply grateful to all South Africans for their unqualified messages of support.
Ma Prof is deservedly the Mother of the Azanian masses.
Jaki Seroke is the secretary for political and pan- African affairs in the PAC of Azania
