In April 1969, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was finally released from Robben Island, where he had been kept under conditions of near-complete solitary confinement for six years. Nine years earlier, on 21 March 1960, Sobukwe had led the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in what he called a ‘Positive Action’ campaign, protesting against the draconian pass laws that regulated the movement, and thereby the lives, of all black South Africans. This mass action was met with a violent response on the part of the South African police. In Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, officers opened fire on a crowd of protesters, killing approximately 80 and injuring as many as 297 people. This event – the Sharpeville Massacre – drew widespread and international attention to the injustices of South Africa's system of apartheid and it led to a three-year jail sentence for Sobukwe for inciting people to protest against the laws of the country.

Not content that by May 1963 Sobukwe would have served the three years of his mandated sentence, the National Party government intervened by invoking a provision of the General Law Amendment Act. The resultant ‘Sobukwe Clause’ enabled Parliament to prolong the detention of any political prisoner on a year-by-year basis without bringing them to trial. It was on this questionable yet legal basis that Sobukwe was moved to Robben Island and kept apart from other prisoners – technically, he was no longer a prisoner as he had served his sentence. He remained there for a further six years. A short report published in the Rand Daily Mail provides a description of Sobukwe's living conditions on the Island: