As we mark the 30th anniversary of the death of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, we need to begin by acknowledging that he remains one of the unsung heroes of the South African and African liberation. He was the founder and became president of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania.
While he should loom large in history for his ideas and his role in fighting apartheid, his ideas are largely unknown except in certain committed circles .
Sobukwe showed decisive leadership and his contribution in putting forward a principled and non-collaborationist approach added a new dimension to the liberation struggle.
Like Steve Biko, Sobukwe challenged the hitherto unquestioned supremacy and arrogance of liberal whites in determining and shaping the black people's struggle against racial oppression.
This decidedly shifted and placed the responsibility firmly within the black community, thus locating the possibility of change with the oppressed.
Black people could no longer stand on the sidelines as hapless victims and watch a game they should have been playing.
This shift of focus was so revolutionary that it not only threatened whites but also some sectors of liberation movement who sought to marginalise the contribution of the PAC.
He believed that change was also based on the individual and promoted what he called "the full development of the human personality".
In this his thinking both prefigured and was also aligned to that of such African luminaries as Kwame Nkrumah and intellectuals like Frantz Fanon.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon could have been articulating Sobukwe's approach when he wrote: "Individual experience, because it is national and because it is a link in the chain of national existence, ceases to be individual, limited and shrunken and is enabled to open out into the truth of the nation and the world ... If the builders of the bridge do not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat."
The boat, Fanon argued should come from the muscles and brains of those who build it.
It is a similar philosophical premise and political approach that Sobukwe embraced when he sought to improve the lives of others, when he galvanised black people into action.
Like Black Consciousness a decade later, involvement in struggle meant a life-changing and life-affirming exercise that would strengthen people's resolve for freedom and help them actively plan a different future.
He was adamant that blacks had to lead the liberation struggle on their own terms and that if "we want to build a new Africa", then "only we can build it".
Unlike present day African leaders he did not vacillate but believed in a continental dignity, self-worth and self-reliance that strove him to exhort "Africa will not retreat! Africa will not compromise! Africa will not relent! Africa will not equivocate!"
It was such militancy that made the apartheid government imprison him for years on end. Then Justice Minister John Vorster argued for his continued imprisonment with the preamble that "He is a man with magnetic personality, great organising ability and a divine sense of mission."
It was for this great humanism that he sought to detain Sobukwe "until this side of eternity".
Today we need to celebrate Sobukwe's life, words and deeds and to say that his ideas should still be part of how we change our society today.
Sobukwe's life was an unfinished song and present generations need to complete this song and ensure that we do create a new society and true equality.
Sobukwe himself was a living testimony of what he stood for, having striven to obtain his bachelor's degree, followed by an economics degree gained in prison and a law degree later in life.
He was an intellectual who was willing to risk his professional standing and indeed his life for what he stood for and hoped to achieve for black people.
When he saw that the ANC was not going in the desired direction, he and his cadres started the Pan Africanist Congress as a radical break from the reformist and conservative politics of the past.
His role in the popular anti-pass laws struggles of the 1950s was immense. His achievements were stalled with the massacre in Sharpeville in 1960, yet this marked a watershed moment in South African history and in turning the international tide against the apartheid regime.
His pan-Africanism also inspired and shaped another great epoch in South African history, and that is the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement almost a decade later.
Arguably this was the second turning point, where black youth through their brave efforts and in successive waves of protests in the years that followed, demonstrated their commitment to rise up against their oppressor, thus paving the way for the changes of the 1990s.
Fourteen years since the advent of our political democracy the question remains whether we have arrived at a new point in our history and whether Sobukwe's legacy can help us to lay the ground for the future.
In a country where the enemies of progress are not out there, but within ourselves and our policies and actions, it would bode well if we learnt from Sobukwe's unflinching, principled approach to reality.
In a country where the current leadership of the state has shown itself to be uncaring and self-serving, it would do well to learn from Sobukwe's example and to understand that each strand of the liberation movement can still find its homecoming in South Africa of the present and the future.
This rich past and its ideas that live on can still mesmerise and guide us as we seek a better path to uplift and truly revolutionise our people's lives.
As we enter the period of disillusionment with the so-called rainbow nation that excludes the centrality of African content, we need to go to what has worked in the past, find strength in our people, reclaim our heroes, learn from our past and locate the possibility of change with the people.
Sobukwe's literary and political contributions are a necessary antidote to the meaningless but intoxicating language of rainbowism.
Indeed, Sobukwe could easily have authored the Bob Marley song None But Ourselves Can Free Our Minds.
- Professor Sipho Seepe is the president of the SA Institute of Race Relations.