We’ve mentioned earlier that our task is not to provide either a personal or an intellectual biography for Sobukwe, at least not in a conventional sense. Our aim remains for him to speak; at best, we peer over his shoulder, as in the way to which the photograph of our preface sensitised us. Even so, there are some orienting remarks we feel necessary to make, in order for his voice to resonate more clearly in the present. To that end we’ve alerted the reader to the importance of our footnotes – commentary or direction from the wings, as it were, or mise en scène providing a fuller and more meaningful understanding of the action on centre stage. We continue this practice throughout.

However, there is also some commentary that needs to be somewhat more explicit. In keeping with the metaphor of the theatre, this would be those notes printed in the handbill or programme, which provide more background, some capsule details about the performers and the performance itself, and which anticipate comments or questions the audience may have. For example, there is an eleven-year gap between Sobukwe's ‘completers’ social’ speech at Fort Hare College in 1949 and his article in The Africanist in 1958. What happened in the intervening decade? This short introduction to Part II serves to provide such detail.

The section starts with the speech Sobukwe delivered, as chairperson of the Student Representative Council, to the graduating class at Fort Hare. It is remarkable for its maturity and oratory. It was also a watershed moment in Sobukwe's life, a turn at a crossroads in many ways. The career trajectory he had imagined for himself a few years earlier, and the expectation among his benefactors, was that upon graduation he would return to Healdtown Institute as a teacher. The completers’ speech, however, so angered the Methodist administrators of that institution that that path was closed down – he was now a clear ‘troublemaker’ and ‘unsuitable’ for a position at Healdtown. There are indications, though, that this was not quite the disappointment such administrators may have imagined, as Sobukwe felt a gnawing pull to make a contribution on a larger stage than that of a rural teacher, the prestige and importance of the Healdtown school notwithstanding.