“Torn Between Pride and Pain”: Sobukwe’s Grandson Speaks Out as Graaff-Reinet Renaming Ignites Fury

“Torn Between Pride and Pain”: Sobukwe’s Grandson Speaks Out as Graaff-Reinet Renaming Ignites Fury

The Karoo town of Graaff-Reinet, founded in 1786, now officially bears the name of one of South Africa’s most uncompromising liberation heroes. The gazetting of Robert Sobukwe Town has transformed a dusty administrative process into a national battlefield over memory, identity, and who gets to write the country’s story.

For the Sobukwe family, however, there is no triumphonly a heavy, conflicting grief.

“I’m kind of torn about it,” admits Tsepo Sobukwe, grandson of the Pan Africanist Congress founder. “It is very painful to read all the backlash and all the negative things that are being said. But I’m happy that his legacy will be remembered.”

A Scripted Backlash, A Deeper Wound

The resistance was anticipated. “Graaff-Reinet is a small town that carries a lot of apartheid legacies,” Sobukwe notes quietly. Economic control, he points out, “is still in the hands of a minority.” Yet even he was shaken by the hostility from young South Africans, people his grandfather fought to free. “What shocked me was how some people, particularly the youth, were also sounding opposition.”

He describes the attacks as almost “scripted.” But the script cuts deep when it targets a man the apartheid regime deemed so dangerous they buried him in solitary confinement on Robben Island, separated even from other political prisoners.

“It Was Done as a Political Act”: The Opposition Case

Opposition has been swift and organised. Democratic Alliance Deputy Minister Samantha Graham-Mare argues the process bypassed the town’s residents. “The choice of name was not made by anybody who comes from the town. It was done as a political act, not as a form of redress.”

She confirms that objections are being lodged with the minister, citing a “fundamental flaw” in the gazette that local attorneys intend to challenge. The deadline is 8 March.

The FF Plus has gone further, urging Afrikaners and all South Africans to “ignore” the name change. Party leader Dr Corné Mulder frames the issue as forced sacrifice: “It has become customary to expect Afrikaners, and only Afrikaners, to sacrifice their heritage on the altar to appease the rest. We refuse to keep doing it.”

“A Prisoner Unlike Any Other”: The PAC’s Rebuttal

The PAC, the very organisation Sobukwe founded in 1959, has responded with characteristic bluntness. The rejection by the DA and FF Plus, it argues, “reflects a lingering fear of the ideas Sobukwe represented.” Ideas so threatening, the party reminds, that the apartheid state crafted special lawsthe infamous “Sobukwe Clause”to keep him caged beyond his sentence.

“This rejection is not about process or consultation,” the PAC insists. “It is resistance to decolonisation, historical truth, and the inevitable dismantling of apartheid symbols.”

Memorialisation and Its Fragility

Tsepo Sobukwe touches on a deeper anxiety. Statues can be toppled. Names can be changed back. “There are always issues with memorialising people and leaders using statues and names,” he reflects, “because another political power can come along and wipe all that out.”

His grandfather’s legacy, however, may prove harder to erase. Robert Sobukwe does not belong to a family or a party alone; he belongs to an idea of African self-determination that neither the colonial archive nor the municipal gazette can fully contain. The town now carries his name. The battle over what that name means has only just begun.

Yet amid the fury, Sobukwe offers a quiet plea: “People must embrace change. We come from a very painful past, and a lot of the names were forced upon us. We were not part of the decision-making process.”

It is a reminder that transformation is not merely administrative. It is human. And for one family in the Karoo, it is deeply, personally real.

{Source: IOL}

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