Veronica Zodwa Sobukwe celebrates her 90th birthday on Thursday. Hers has been a life of unstinting service and sacrifice to family and country, and South Africa should be showering her with praise and honours. But she is an unsung heroine, little known because of her modesty, shyness and stoicism.
She is the widow of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, who died in 1978. The story is well known: he was the PAC leader whose campaign against the hated "pass" led to the Sharpeville massacre on March 21 1960, now observed as Human Rights Day.
Born in Hlobane, KwaZulu-Natal, Veronica Zodwa Mathe was studying nursing at Victoria Hospital in Alice; in 1949, she and her colleagues went on strike over conditions. They were expelled from their rooms and slept in the open for two weeks. Students from nearby Fort Hare University College helped them — and she met Robert Sobukwe, chairman of the students representative council and a leader in the ANC Youth League. "I loved him at first sight," she told me years later.
She went to Johannesburg to work as a midwife and he became a teacher in Standerton. They met occasionally at the train station there whenever she travelled to KwaZulu-Natal. When he was appointed a "language assistant" in Zulu at the University of the Witwatersrand, they married and moved to Soweto.
It was a contented, happy existence and the family flourished as four children came. Sobukwe's job at Wits was unusual for a black person and they were well off. But it was not enough for him. The ANC was fighting apartheid and Sobukwe believed tougher action was needed: he led a breakaway of Africanists, arguing for non-collaboration with the oppressor.
He called on black people to leave their passes at home and offer themselves for arrest. Veronica shared his decision to give the lead and be the first to go to prison. Early on the morning of March 21 they prayed together. Then he walked to Orlando police station and she went to her clinic job.Their agreement that he give up his career and their comfortable lives in the cause of freedom went beyond resigning from Wits. For, a few weeks before, Rhodes University had offered him a lectureship in African languages, a first for a black person at a "white" university. The couple turned it down.
Instead, March 21 proved the last day of normality for the family.
He was jailed for three years for "incitement". As his sentence ended, the government, fearing his power, rushed through a special law, the "Sobukwe Clause", to keep him imprisoned without trial. He was held in virtual solitary confinement on Robben Island, in a two-roomed building inside a fenced, guarded stockade. Veronica was allowed occasional visits, but was subjected to humiliating body searches. Later, she was allowed to stay with him, as were their children. Meals were supplied from the prison warders' mess — but the family had to pay for the food.
After six years Sobukwe was removed to Kimberley — without her being told — and dumped in a house in Galeshewe township. She went there as quickly as she could and created as much of a family existence as possible.
Sobukwe was under house arrest from sunset to sunrise, with severe restrictions on his liberty.
Cancer struck him after nine years, made worse because the restrictions delayed diagnosis and treatment. A lung was removed at Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital. Veronica was with him when he was released for a few days, although suffering huge pain. He went to rest at a friend's house but the security police arrived and roughly ordered him to get out because it was in a "white" suburb; she tried to protect him with her body but the police pushed her out of the way.
Still more trauma followed at Sobukwe's funeral in Graaff-Reinet: Veronica stood silently as young militants ignored her and created chaos in protest at the presence of Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
The government told her to leave the Galeshewe house. She tried to buy land in Swaziland; the Swazi government, for reasons still unknown, rejected her. Restlessly, she moved to Graaff-Reinet, Sobukwe's birthplace; then to Alice; and then finally back to Graaff-Reinet. She lives there now, on a street where only whites were allowed in the apartheid era. The warmth in her voice hides the pain she has been in for years, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and never getting adequate treatment.
Veronica Zodwa Sobukwe does not complain. She never has. Instead, she proved herself a steadfast and loyal wife, fully joined in her husband's sacrifices. She has lived with courage and dignity, coping with all the agonising traumas as they have happened. In the nearly 60 years I have known her, the only expression of anguish I have heard from her, at the worst of times, has been a soft click of the tongue, or a deep, quiet sigh.
• Pogrund is an acclaimed journalist and author of 'How Can Man Die Better: The Life of Robert Sobukwe', (Jonathan Ball Publishers)..