Robert Sobukwe - How can Man Die Better

Book excerpt: I am greatly privileged to have known him and to have fallen under his spell. His long imprisonment, restriction and early death were a major tragedy for our land and the world.' - ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU on Sobukwe On 21 March 1960, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe led a mass defiance of South Africa's pass laws. He urged blacks to go to the nearest police station and demand arrest. Police opened fi re on a peaceful crowd in the township of Sharpeville and killed 69 people. This protest changed the course of South Africa's history. Sobukwe, leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress, was jailed for three years for incitement. At the end of his sentence the government rushed the so-called 'Sobukwe Clause' through Parliament, to keep him in prison without a trial. For the next six years Sobukwe was kept in solitary confinement on Robben Island. On his release Sobukwe was banished to the town of Kimberley, with very severe restrictions on his freedom, until his death in February 1978. This book is the story of a South African hero, and of the friendship between him and Benjamin Pogrund, whose joint experiences and debates chart the course of a tyrannous regime and the growth of black resistance. This new edition of How Can Man Die Better contains a number of previously unpublished photographs and an updated Epilogue.