Addressing the Annual Robert Sobukwe Memorial Lecture hosted by APLA-MVA in Pretoria a few years ago, I made a statement that is haunting me today. I said that unless there is a deliberate and urgent attempt on the part of the pan Afrikanist movement to recapture the legacy of Robert Sobukwe, there is serious potential that he will be reduced to a figure on t-shirts, much like Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara. The unintended consequence of popularising figures without popularising their legacies and ideological postures is that they end up becoming part of pop culture. They get reduced to cool dudes plastered across t-shirts, posters with their images hanging on walls of some of the most regressive institutions of our day. For example, Rhodes University, unarguably an ivory tower of White supremacy, a highly liberal university that is resistant to transformation, has a building named after Steve Biko in which walls are adorned with posters of Biko. The irony of this does not escape a conscious mind. There is nothing about Rhodes University that represents what Biko stood for. In fact, Rhodes University is an anti-thesis of that which Biko symbolises. And herein lies the challenge facing those in our generation who are preoccupied with love for our people. We have a duty to utilise our given platforms to massify legacies like that of Bantu Biko, Robert Sobukwe, Oliver Tambo and many others who impacted in the architecting of our struggle, so that they dont become t-shirt figures worn confidently by liberals, right-wingers and all regressive elements who have no inkling what the faces on their t-shirts symbolise beyond looking cool. Of all things Biko or Sobukwe died for, being celebrities whose images decorate t-shirts is not one of them.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 13:49:36 +0000
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