Without intending any insult may I wish you a peaceful Christmas season and a happy opportunity-filled New Year!
My love and very best wishes to Jennifer.
Yours sincerely,
Bob
Robert Sobukwe
to Veronica Sobukwe,
7 December 1964 (Bc22)
Hullo Darling,
Thank you indeed for the Birthday and Christmas cards. They were the sweetest and loveliest I have ever received. They made my day for me!
Thank you also for the Twenty Rands and the Parker refills. I am sorry to have been such a nuisance – at this time of all times. Unfortunately, I had not yet been informed that Fabian’s money had arrived and I feared that when the Examination Entry Forms arrived I wouldn’t have the money to pay. They haven’t arrived yet: but the British Embassy promised to send them in good time. You know, I hope, that the examination is held in June, not in December. I still have a few months for concentrated revision. Lectures end in March!
I am rather glad you are coming by train and not by car. I fear the roads these days. Fabian has expressed a desire to come, but has not fixed a definite date. He did say though, that if he does not succeed in making the journey, Vemba91 certainly will.
I’d be happy if you could bring a little Mist. Pot. Cit.92 with you, not more than two bottles for a start and some of those pads for corns and callouses. I am trying to cut down on cakes and sweets but I certainly must have some scones baked by Mili and a cake or two baked by her mother!
Incidentally, thank them on my behalf for their touching Christmas card. I wish you all the loveliest and most satisfying Christmas imaginable.
I received a letter from Buti this morning, informing me, inter alia, that Zozo celebrated her twentieth birthday on the 12th November. How these children grow! Dorris then must be 22 or more. The tragedy is that they are merely sitting in mental idleness at home.
I received a telegram from Fabian this morning, wishing me a happy birthday.93 He must have remembered rather late on Saturday that the great day had come!
I am looking forward very keenly to your visit. Mam Tshawe is going to Queenstown for the N.C.A.W.94 meeting this year, so they won’t be coming down to Cape Town. Buti says they’ll come down in two years’ time when one of his boys is ordained as a priest.
Give my love and best wishes to Mama and the kids – as well as to the Varas and Matebulas.
Cheerio, little girl. God bless you richly.
Your loving husband,
Mangi
P.S. I have not yet renewed my subscription for the Cape Times and the Cape Argus. I don’t know when the subscriptions expire. They haven’t sent me any renewal forms. But the Cape Times did discontinue its deliveries from the 21st to the 27th November. If you haven’t done so yet, don’t pay any subscription until you’ve met me. I’ve already paid for the Sunday Times and the Sunday Express. Mangi
1The full verse from Malachi 3 reads as follows: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.”
2Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland.
3A possible reference to when Veronica might again be able to visit him at Robben Island.
4Gerald Bullett, Sydney Smith: A Biography and a Selection (1951). Sydney Smith was an Anglican clergyman and noted wit. Sobukwe refers to this book in his letter to Mrs Marquard of 16 October 1968.
5Leo Marquard (1897–1974) was a prominent figure in South African liberalism. He founded the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) in 1924, and was likewise instrumental in establishing the South African Institute of Race Relations (1929) and was a leading figure in the founding of the South African Liberal Party in 1953. He was the author of The Black Man’s Burden (1943), a commentary on South African politics published under the pseudonym John Burger, and People and Policies of South Africa (1950). He worked as head of the Oxford University Press in Cape Town during the 1950s and early 1960s.
6Goodbye.
7Pogrund is referring to his study on the Communist influence on black politics in South Africa (previously mentioned in his letter to Sobukwe of 11 December 1963), for which he secured a grant from Stanford University and a year’s leave from the Rand Daily Mail. The influence of communists and white liberals in watering down the Africanist agendas of the African National Congress had been one of the crucial reasons that Sobukwe had broken with the ANC. Sobukwe was, as such, not only an expert but a historical participant within the broader topic of Pogrund’s research. It is curious, given the monitoring of Sobukwe’s letters, that this overtly political topic was not censored and that Pogrund had been granted permission to meet with Sobukwe to discuss this topic. Sobukwe and Pogrund were of course aware that this was an unusual concession. The government had perhaps hoped – so Pogrund (2015) speculates – that he would be able to bear witness to the fact that Sobukwe was being neither starved nor beaten, as was alleged by PAC leaders. Furthermore, given the inevitable monitoring and surveillance that took place in these meetings, they provided the government with a way of finding out what was on Sobukwe’s mind. Sobukwe “understood the game as well as I did”, reports Pogrund. “We worked on the premise that the room was bugged … We spoke of personal matters and of our families and friends. We scribbled a few notes to each other when we had especially private details to convey” (2015: 199).
8Sobukwe had been offered employment in the United States by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. An “exit permit” meant he would be entitled to leave South Africa but never to return.
9University of Cape Town.
10That is, the children.
11Dennis Siwisa’s wife.
12This may have been a reference to Sobukwe’s fellow PAC leader Peter Raboroko.
13The famous Methodist school at Fort Beaufort, which Nelson Mandela had attended.
14Pogrund (2015: 207) viewed this smear letter as the result of his reporting on the rise of black political power in Swaziland. His reporting “was not appreciated by … the white settlers there and I guessed the poison was from one or more of them”. Pogrund notes also that he was touched that Sobukwe devoted one of his rationed letters to write a consoling note to Astrid.
15Veronica Zodwa Sobukwe.
16Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003) was a renowned British historian and Oxford University professor. The Listener published his lectures on “The Rise of Christian Europe”, later collected as a book, in November and December 1963. Trevor-Roper did not have a high opinion of African history, saying in 1963 that “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europe in Africa. The rest is largely darkness.” This is worth noting, because although Sobukwe evidently had much in common with Nell Marquard’s reading interests, there would also have been ideological trends within some of this material that Sobukwe would have been opposed to.
17Uncle Remus is the narrator and eponymous character of Joel Chandler Harris’s series of books (c.1881) based on African American folktales of the late 19th century and told in the