ZONDENI VERONICA SOBUKWE FONDLY REMEMBERED BY KIMBERLEY FRIEND

The Northern Cape has somberly received the news of the passing of Zondeni Veronica Sobukwe and her Kimberley friend in the person of the elderly Joyce Makhele is grief-stricken.

The downcast in the South African political landscape owing to the death of the “The Mother of Azania,” as the 91-year old Zondeni was affectionately known in the party fold she shared with her iconic husband Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, has hit home. The province’s city of Kimberley which bears its own chapter in the history books of the Sobukwe’s, is also in mourning.

As word of her passing spread with the rising sun of Wednesday 15 August, sorrow gripped Sis Joyce Makhele a revered figure to many a Galeshewe in Kimberley resident, who had kept enquiring about the health of her bed-ridden friend over the last few days.

When Pan African Congress (PAC) founder Robert Sobukwe got banished to Kimberley upon his release from Robben Island prison in 1969 and having died in the city in 1978, the Makhele’s were one of the first families to embrace him. Sis Joyce had already known Sobukwe’s spouse Veronica from political and social interactions in Soweto years earlier.

Veronica had transcended from student-nurse leadership to mobilising for the PAC and having fallen in love and married Robert Sobukwe during that phase of life.

“Malumekazi (Veronica) was a soft-spoken someone, she was a woman of few words but she had a high-sense of humour. She had a special friend Mrs Agnes Masoabi because they were Durban girls. They use to sit down together and talk a lot of Zulu and reminisce about a lot of things eNatal,” recalled Sis Joyce solemnly.

She indicated that it was in Spring of 2013 when the mid-80s aged and sickly Veronica trekked to Kimberley on an occasion of the honouring of her late husband and having slept over at her Lang Street house in Galeshewe. “She came with Dedani (Dedanizizwe one of the Sobukwe children) coming to pay her condolences for my late sister Juliana.”

It was also in the evening of that last Kimberley visit that Veronica could not make it to the hotel she was booked in at but slept at the Makhele residence, a stone throw from the Sobukwe house of banishment.  “In the evening when they came to fetch her, I refused (to let her go) because I could see that Malumekazi was not well,” asserted Sis Joyce with a tone of strictness that defies her golden years that are to hug 80 next month.

“What saddens me most is that Malumekazi was able at her age to come and pay condolences for my elder sister but I cannot do the same to her children and go tell boMiliswa and go and see them and show them the love that we had with their parents,” said Sis Joyce regretfully.

She took this writer down memory lane, explaining how Mama Sobukwe was a political giant in her own right, having dubbed themselves in the 1960s as the “Poqo girls” in reference to the PAC’s then military wing.

Sis Joyce reminisced about a friend who was a bicycle riding staff-nurse, political activist and entrepreneur selling soft-goods such as clothes in fending for her family during her husband’s incarceration. She added that from Soweto to staying permanently in Kimberley with her banned husband, Veronica kept going on the trot, selling clothes into the 70s.

It was through this interview that Sis Joyce revealed that the Sobukwe’s secretly kept a television set and would drape the windows with blankets for some hush-hush viewing.

Apart from her recollections over the Soweto and Kimberley life and times of Veronica, Sis Joyce took to priding herself as a Pan-Africanist and bravely revealed who the apartheid government’s spy was in the neighbourhood, charged with peeping over the walls of the Sobukwe household.

The Northern Cape’s MEC for Sports, Arts and Culture Bongiwe Mbinqo-Gigaba extended her condolences to Sobukwe family. Historian at the department Sephai Mngqolo reflected thus; “the Sobukwe’s have over the years formed a strong political and family bond with the people of Kimberley. She (Veronica) displayed this when her husband was banished and banned to Kimberley.

“Mama Sobukwe showed what a loving, strong, humble and principled woman she was. She supported her husband through all trials and tribulations. The supportive role she played to her family during those difficult times serve as a cue to us as citizens,” he concluded.

Tourist guide, PAC member and Galeshewe resident Boitumelo Phirisi who specialises in tours called the Sobukwe Route – a walk from the Sobukwe household to his law practice offices – was also saddened by Mama Sobukwe’s passing. “We can always equate Mama Sobukwe’s contribution to the freedom struggle to that of her husband in that she was a pillar of strength, motivating and building his moral.”

In 1997, Zondeni Veronica Sobukwe told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Human Rights Violations hearings in her testimony over her husband’s death under banishment in Kimberley in 1978, that it had resulted from having been poisoned whilst imprisoned on Robben Island.

“In 1965 or 1966 he complained that his food was served with broken glass,” she said according to a verbatim transcript of her King William’s Town testimony.

When she was awarded the National Order of Luthuli in Silver by President Cyril Ramaphosa in April this year in marking the 40^th anniversary of Robert Sobukwe’s death, social media was dominated by captions of a letter she had written to then apartheid minister of justice B.J Voster in March 1966:

“I wish to write to you as I am worried about the health of my husband Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe. When I visited him on Robben Island in January, I saw that his health had deteriorated, I know his health better than anyone else,” she wrote in appeal for her husband’s release.

By Thabo Mothibi

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