One afternoon in 1957 in Johannesburg, Benjamin Pogrund walked into a classroom at the University of the Witwatersrand to meet his fiancée Astrid. He found her in conversation with her teacher, Robert Sobukwe, a lecturer in isiZulu (his official title at the university was “language assistant”). Astrid had spoken warmly of Sobukwe before and Pogrund took an easy liking to him, even though, as he later wrote, in the early days of their friendship he was not particularly impressed by Sobukwe as an intellectual (finding him “too academic and too timid”). No record of Sobukwe’s early impressions of Pogrund is available in the archives. They began to meet at Sobukwe’s office at Wits and later at Pogrund’s home in the whites-only suburbs of Johannesburg; Pogrund would “abuse” his journalistic privileges to visit Sobukwe at his home in Mofolo, a suburb of the Soweto township, sometimes socializing there with other men from the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) such as P.K. Leballo, Zephaniah Mothopeng, and Peter Raboroko.
Sobukwe and Pogrund were both very similar and very different men. Similar in that they shared the social and intellectual formation of those educated in the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment. Pogrund was less critical of this formation than Sobukwe, whose influences were more diverse. Sobukwe would later describe his taste in reading as “Catholic,” which is an apt way to describe who he was as an intellectual and a person. He had, for instance, the prodigious facility for and interest in language that is natural to anyone whose life has not been narrowed by a fascistic political context but particularly commendable in one whose life was interfered with in just such a way. Although the structure of settler society meant that settlers could get by as monolinguals, while natives were in general multilingual, Sobukwe’s openness to and interest in other languages and their cultures was probably unusual. He spoke the Afrikaans of both town and location fluently, as well as isiXhosa, seSotho, isiZulu, and English (the neat divisions between some of these languages, and indeed the idea that there are clear points at which one part of the spectrum of language can be marked off from another, was itself the product of colonial linguistics and anthropology). As an adult he became interested in Arabic, wishing to study it while in prison.
Both Pogrund and Sobukwe became active opponents of apartheid for which each man paid his price. Pogrund was serially harassed by the state (and periodically thrown into jail), while the newspaper he worked for was taken to court on account of his journalism. Sobukwe spent nine years in prison—six in solitary confinement on Robben Island—for his role in the Pan Africanist Congress’s anti-pass campaign and was then banished to the administrative district of Galeshewe in Kimberley in what was then the Cape province.
Despite their similarities, they were also very different men. Each inhabited seemingly disparate political traditions. Pogrund was a card-carrying liberal, although not of the more conservative set. Margaret Ballinger, the first president of the Liberal Party of South Africa, still believed in the qualified franchise, according to which the right to vote belonged to those who were educated, owned some property, and were assimilated into colonial manners. Instead, Pogrund would find common cause with the more radical wing of the Liberal Party, which included figures like Randolph Vigne of the African Resistance Movement (a collection of liberals, socialists, and African nationalists briefly and catastrophically engaged in armed struggle. There is no suggestion that Pogrund himself was part of ARM and it is unknown whether he approved of its activities). These younger and more progressive members of the party rejected the qualified franchise entirely on the grounds of its inherent racism, supported state-facilitated redistribution of land, and worked to push the party in a more radical direction. Pogrund quit the party when he became a journalist to preserve his impartiality—a critical part of his self-fashioning both in his memoir and his letters to Sobukwe—although he has remained a man of liberal democratic values throughout his life.
Sobukwe was the founding president of the PAC, the then-nascent political project of a group of young Africanists who broke from the African National Congress in 1959 over its abandonment of the more orthodox nationalism embodied in the 1949 Programme of Action. The formation of the Congress Alliance meant a rapprochement with Indians and whites (mostly Communist) and culminated in the declaration of the Freedom Charter, all of which the Africanists rejected.
Despite public antagonism between Pan Africanists and Liberals, there is a book to be written about their private social relationships with one another, which in many cases included instances of deep friendship and solidarity even as Africanists rejected liberals and liberalism from the podium in fiery and uncompromising language. Bessie Head’s friendship with Randolph Vigne is an example, and there are tomes to be written about Patrick Duncan’s friendships, and indeed many others. Incidentally, the pejorative “white liberal” referred at the time not only to whites of liberal convictions but also to white communists— any white person thought to be inappropriately involved in the political affairs of Africans (racially defined).
Another crucial difference between the two men was, of course, their relative positions in the legal regime under which they lived as adults. In the 1960s the apartheid state was attempting to enlist and shape the meaning of even the most mundane aspects of human social life in the construction of race. The epistemology of race that underwrote the Population Registration Act of 1950 cast race as a matter of “common sense.” Those appointed to “racially classify” worked with the existing social conventions so that every bit of social information, such as a person’s environment, what they wore, whether they played soccer or rugby, lay on a high bed or a low bed, what sort of beer they drank, and so on, became relevant to determining how to classify them. Thus, the minutiae of the everyday was permeated by racial thinking.
Alongside the racialization of the entire population, the state was also busy buttressing the fractal version of race—tribe. Under the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959, various homelands, or Bantustans, were created in which Africans (conceived of in racial and tribal terms) were granted pseudo-citizenship which came with a veneer of political entitlements, including, significantly, the right to land use (not ownership) within their assigned homeland (on grounds of an externally ascribed tribal affiliation). Africans so defined fractured into natives and “ethnic strangers” depending on whether they were in their “own” tribal homeland or that of another group. This also meant that they were foreigners in South Africa proper (the domain of civil rather than customary law) with no political rights there whatsoever.
This solved what would otherwise have been a serious political problem from the perspective of the state: that it governed over a politically disenfranchised majority. By dividing Africans into smaller “tribal” groups and parceling them off into separate homelands, the state also dealt with, or at least attempted to deal with, the problem of a common political consciousness and solidarity developing among those it oppressed. Mahmood Mamdani has described it as a strategy of defining and administratively producing new and more malleable subjectivities in order to better rule. It also solved an economic problem: namely, the need of capital (overwhelmingly held and controlled by whites) for cheap and fungible labor. None of this was new, of course, and similar methods had been theorized and put into practice across the British Empire after the anti-colonial rebellions of the mid-to-late 1800s.
No one is born racialized, or indeed tribalized, and a feverish and constant labor, into which the racialized are themselves conscripted, must all the time take place to maintain the social fact of race. All this is to say that where Pogrund was both produced and conscripted by the state and society as white—made into and maintained as a white person—Sobukwe was produced and conscripted by those same forces as black, and forcibly tribalized by the regime in its attempt to cut the colonized twice over, as Mamdani puts it.
What followed their meeting at Wits, was an intensely intimate friendship defined by a passion and a longing for each other’s company and the dissolution of personal boundaries through the exchange of deeply personal declarations of love. This friendship, together with Sobukwe’s public speeches, complicates the established treatment of Sobukwe as a racially essentialist black nationalist. When Sobukwe asked Pogrund to organize his wife Veronica’s fortieth birthday celebrations, he spoke in their exchanges about “our plans” and “what we had intended”, thanking Pogrund and saying that “I know you enjoy doing all for me and mine, but I can assure you it is much more than I would have expected even from one who had shared the same womb with me.” To describe Pogrund as closer than one with whom he shared the same womb, is to mobilize the established discursive force of biology as the bedrock of filiation against its intended purposes. These exchanges are both moving and subversive.
In another letter, Sobukwe comments that the term “friend” was both inadequate and incongruous to describe his feelings about Pogrund. Recalling a visit from the liberal politician Helen Suzman to Robben Island (where Sobukwe was imprisoned between 1963 and 1969), Sobukwe wrote: “Helen…
