Robert Sobukwe

Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was born in Graaff-Reinet in South Africa's Cape Province, the youngest of six children of a municipal labourer and a domestic worker. His academic gifts carried him to Fort Hare University, where he was elected president of the Students' Representative Council and established himself as a formidable orator, later completing further study through the University of London.

Sobukwe became active in the African National Congress but grew increasingly critical of what he saw as the organisation's compromise with non-African political interests, and in 1959 he led a breakaway movement to found the Pan Africanist Congress, becoming its first president. Sobukwe was a committed Africanist, believing firmly that South Africa's future belonged to its African majority and famously declaring "there is only one race, the human race."

In 1960, Sobukwe led the PAC's campaign against South Africa's pass laws, which required Black South Africans to carry identification documents restricting their movement. The campaign culminated in the Sharpeville Massacre, when police opened fire on peaceful protesters. Sobukwe was arrested and sentenced to three years, refusing legal representation on the grounds that the apartheid court had no legitimate jurisdiction over him. As his sentence neared completion, the South African government passed special legislation allowing his indefinite detention without further trial, and he spent years imprisoned on Robben Island and under house arrest before dying of lung cancer in 1978, still restricted, sixteen years before South Africa's first democratic elections.