Keynote Address by Mzwanele Nyhontso
The President of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania 65th Commemoration of the Sharpeville Massacre
21st March 2025 Dlomo Dam Sharpeville
Cde SG Apa Pooe
Members of the NEC of the PAC
Veterans and Elders
Military Veterans of APLA
Leadership of PAWO, PAYCO, PASMA
Fraternal Revolutionary Organisations
Family members of our fallen martyrs
Ladies and Gentleman
I greet you on this very auspicious occasion commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre. On this Day in 1960 the people of Sharpeville answered the call of the first President of the PAC, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, to peacefully march towards their nearest police station and voluntarily hand in their passbook.
If anyone may have forgotten that this passbook was the manifestation of the dehumanisation of the African in the land of his birth. It was a constant reminder, that you are not worthy as a human being, if you did not have your passbook with you.
Your self-esteem, your self-respect and your autonomy to make your own decisions was attached to this book.
Let me illustrate this to you, You have all heard the story where a person whose house was on fire, would run in to save his passbook and leave all valuables behind. Such was the extent to which the African was
dehumanised.
Our mothers were called girls and our fathers were called boys into the old age. Handing in the Dompas challenged the racist political order of the day at its very core.
As long as Africans thought of themselves as being less than human, because of this pass book, they would never resist white rule, white domination and oppression. The response of the Apartheid government to the audacity, to the courage and fearlessness of the PAC was immediate, was violent, was harsh and was brutal resulting in the deaths we are commemorating here today.
The leadership of the PAC in all spaces where the African masses handed in their passes were exemplary, was disciplined, and was focussed on the task at hand in the days that followed. We are here in Sharpeville and we must remember the role of our local leaders like the Nyakane brothers. We also remember Phillip Kgosana
leading the March in Cape Town to protest the Sharpeville and Langa Massacres.
And offcourse Sobukwe himself in Orlando Soweto. It was the PAC that introduced the slogan High Morals High Discipline.
We should all take inspiration from these leaders and especially now, as we commemorate our fallen heroes. 65 years is a very long time. We cannot blame our compatriots if they don’t know their political history. Bantu education had no interest in teaching us about Sharpeville, about Sobukwe, about the fact that in much of the 1960’s period the majority of prisoners on the infamous Robben Island were members of the PAC and its resistance component POQO.
Every Pan Africanist who physically resisted Apartheid embraced the title of POQO and we owe these courageous cadres a great debt for keeping the flames of resistance alive in the immediate days, months and years after the banning of the PAC.
In democratic South Africa, many people know Sharpeville but without the PAC, and without Sobukwe. I encourage you especially our youth, to write the story of POQO, use social media, and tell the history of the Pan Africanists and the anti-pass campaign. We cannot accuse others for not writing about our movement and our heroes in history textbooks, when we do not make an effort to write our own history,to record our elders who are still alive to tell the story of what happened on that fateful day in Langa and Sharpeville in 1960. We have a proud, courageous and
great political history to tell.
Let me return to the courage of Sobukwe and driving the anti-pass campaign. He understood with revolutionary clarity that the Dompas could not be wished away through petitions, passive resistance and requests to the white supremacists governments.
It needed immediate and direct action. His message was simple enough for anyone regardless of their social status to do and say. “Take back your dompas, I will not be sub-human again. I am taking back my dignity.”
If anyone was fooled by the belief that white supremacy ended on the 27th April 1994, then you are seriously mistaken. White supremacy is not some far right minority fringe group. It is a dominant force that have always advanced and protected its own interests, especially during the past 30 years of democracy.
But White Supremacists have now come out of the political closet. They are emboldened by the thugs who run the United States of America using their X social media accounts.
Sobukwe taught them that an African is anyone that gives their loyalty to Africa, regardless of your origin or the colour of your skin. It was Sobukwe who taught them that there is only one race, the human race. But, instead of engaging Sobukwe, they imprisoned him alone, and away from other political prisoners on Robben Island.
Then they extended his imprisonment through their racist parliament and called it the Sobukwe Clause.
Sobukwe taught us that it is only we as Africans that can guarantee the establishment of a genuine democracy in which all will be regarded as citizens of a common state and be governed as individuals and not as separate groups.
Those who are advancing white privilege and whites interests want to be governed as
separate groups. Today they exist with a common agenda, where they try to outperform each other in undermining the rule of the African majority.
They thrive on causing division and chaos amongst the African majority. I encourage you to take the statements and their actions very seriously. I also encourage you to know them, by name and by their actions. Here are a few, I am sure there are many more.
Listen to what they do;
AfriForum, is part of the broader Solidarity movement, that includes both, political, cultural and labour components. AfriForum is not the only one’s colluding with the United States of America against the African masses.
Let them not fool you with their so-called ONLY anti-ANC leadership stance. This is purely a divide and conquer
tactic. I have read that the Federal Chairperson of the DA, Helen Zille, is now talking about a DA foreign policy and an ANC foreign policy.
We have a foreign Minister but the DA send their own delegation to the United States of America to undermine this country.
Then there is the Cape Exit Party who openly seek to seize Azanian land on our West Coast and seek the protection of the United States of America to stealing Azanian land.
They openly offering the United States military bases on Azanian soil. By inviting a white supremacist superpower to support their ambitions, they are inviting war, destruction and deaths on a massive scale that will pale in comparison to the massacres that this country has seen under colonialism and Apartheid.
And if you doubt my words and think I am engaging in scare-mongering, let us turn to the United States ending funding for HIV and AIDS programmes in South Africa.
It is estimated that approximately 500 000 people can die because of this cut to funding. They still want what they came here for 370 years ago. To steal the land. They claim that their land is being expropriated. They also claim that we as Africans are mismanaging the land and that they have very definite ideas about which chunks of
Azania they want, exclusively for their own use, where no Africans will be allowed.
I can assure you if they succeed, they will re-introduce the dompas and other racist laws. They want Apartheid back, but this time they want Apartheid on steroids, like you see in Gaza in Palestine.
When the Africans marched to hand in their dompas, 65 years ago their slogan was Izwe Lethu. They had a plan beyond the dompas. They wanted their land restored to them.
Yes Restored, not given as a gift, in parts or in homelands, for which we had to be grateful. I encourage you to increase the popularity of this slogan Izwe Lethu. Because this slogan strikes fear into the hearts of those advancing white privilege .
As PanAfricanists, we are not against any person, because of their place of origin, even farmers. What we do have a problem with is if the land they are farming on was stolen and they refuse to acknowledge this theft.
We have told farmers who got land and support for their farming from the Apartheid government. You have built your wealth over generations using the land. You can show your loyalty to Azania by sharing your knowledge and experiences that you gained because the Apartheid government favoured you.
Don’t undermine African farmers, by keeping them out of your co-operatives and out of the markets where you trade.
Those advancing white privilege have become so fixated on this word Expropriation and talk of it as if it is land theft.
Let me remind them, that our conquerors and our colonisers stole the land not through occasional individual farm murders, but through brutal and horrific massacres of thousands of our people.
The crime of Apartheid has left deep multi-generational scars, through the poverty, hunger, unemployment and inequality that our people experience every day. This day has been designated as Human Rights Day to restore our dignity.
We are advancing the view that our humanity and our dignity will only be fully restored if our land is
restored.
I encourage all of you to promote the idea, that we have a designated Land Day on our national calendar, so that we can remember who stole the land, assess and report on what progress we have made to restore the land, and how the land is being used to address, our challenges of poverty, unemployment, hunger and inequality.
I want to offer you the hope of African unity as an anti-dote to white supremacy. Unity is not uniformity. Look at my open hand salute. All five fingers are not uniform or the same. But the hand works best when all the fingers respect and appreciate their role and difference.
The thumb cannot do much without the others and so forth. But together we can defend advance and grow for the benefit of all. Let me not ignore the elephant in the room. The Government of National Unity.
I have said this before and will say it again. We are in this government of national unity to govern our people, to set policies, to implement them, to directly restore the land to our people, to support those that got land, and now to increase the pace of the equitable redistribution of land.
We are NOT in government to advance the agenda of white people as a group or to compromise our views with them. In fact, our position is very much the opposite.
We can only deliver on our agenda of land restoration by leading from the front, in the mainstream. Our songs and slogans have their place, but if we remain outside of government we will die on the periphery, with our songs and slogans and even with our insults.
To those who oppose our participation in the GNU, I ask you how much land have you restored to the Azanian masses in the last few months. I know you have not even delivered a grain of sand.
We will not call you unruly and undisciplined when you call us sellouts. You are still our comrades and in time you will understand that only our collective service, our suffering and sacrifice will restore the land to the
Azanian masses the rightful owners of the land.