Wesley House at the University of Fort Hare in the 1940s where Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe was a student. Pictures: SUPPLIED
Wesley House at the University of Fort Hare in the 1940s where Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe was a student. Pictures: SUPPLIED

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FORT Hare University celebrated its centenary this year. One would expect a vibrant celebration not the damp squib that it was. Remarkably, the organisers largely ignored the one person who has delivered the most memorable, insightful and visionary speeches that venerable institution has ever heard, and so missed a golden opportunity.

The man was Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, a leader who ten years after he delivered those magnificent speeches founded the Pan Africanist Congress.

One of his speeches, delivered on October 21 1949 at a graduates’ social, earned Sobukwe a standing ovation from students. Frieda Matthews, wife of Prof Zachariah Keodirelang Matthews, said students quoted the speech for years afterwards. It should have been read at the Fort Hare celebrations, spread on electronic media and published in the press.

In the ’49 speech, Sobukwe addresses issues that plague our universities and society today. "After the college has been in existence for 30 years, the ratio of European to African is 4 to 1," he said. "And we are told that in ten years time we might become an independent university. Are we to understand that an African university (can be) predominantly guided by European thought and strongly influenced by European staff?

"I said last year Fort Hare must be to the African what Stellenbosch is to the Afrikaner. It must be the barometer of African thought."

In Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952, Frantz Fanon writes that, "A black man speaks with a European language. He becomes proportionally whiter in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language; or indeed, any western language, nowadays most particularly English.

"So, almost immediately, the black man is presented with a problem: how to posit a ‘black self’ in a language and discourse in which blackness itself is at best a figure of absence, or worse, a total reversion? The problem, however, is not limited simply to the use of language.

"When a black man arrives in France it is not only the language that changes him. He is changed also because it is from France that he received his knowledge of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, but also because France gave him his physicians, department head, his innumerable little functionaries. At issue is thus not just language but also the civilisation of the white man."

Is this not what Sobukwe implied when he rejected Fort Hare being guided predominantly by European thought and strongly influenced by European staff, and calling on Fort Hare to be the barometer of African thought?

"We want to build a new Africa, and only we can build it," Sobukwe added.

Fanon says what matters is not to know the world but to change it. Towards the conclusion of his 1949 speech, Sobukwe says: "Let me plead with you, lovers of my Africa, to carry with you into the world the vision of a new Africa, an Africa reborn, an Africa rejuvenated, an Africa recreated, young Africa."

This African rebirth or renaissance Sobukwe envisioned cannot be an Africa that still enforces archaic European epistemology. We cannot continue to teach our children about Pythagorean Theorem when Pythagoras was taught mathematics by the ancient Africans of Egypt or that Archimedes "invented" the endless screw that Egyptians had been using for centuries before he was born (for the extraction of percolated water, as Dr Cheikh Anta Diop wrote in Great African Thinkers).

We cannot keep referring to African philosophy as Greek philosophy as George Granville Monah James demonstrates in his book, Stolen Legacy, which should be required reading in schools and universities together with all of Diop’s books.

In her 1994 work, Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, Prof Marimba Ani writes that Africans must wean themselves from the epistemological assumptions that strangle them. Sobukwe reflected this sentiment, proving he was a visionary and an intellectual giant.

He excelled academically. His intellectual honesty and moral integrity made toadies and collaborationists flinch in his presence. And now universities are in turmoil because Sobukwe’s brilliant ideas were overlooked.

Fort Hare should have grabbed a rare opportunity to showcase its brilliant alumnus, and brought to life his thoughts on education. Perhaps by introducing Egyptology instead of Mandarin.

Sobukwe should not be discriminated against because he founded one of the vibrant movements that rivaled the African National Congress. He was a brilliant scholar with four university degrees and a fine orator.

• Ditshego is a fellow of the Pan Africanist Research Institute