Remembering Gamal Abdel Nasser 55 Years On
On this day, 28 September 1970, Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, an Egyptian military officer and revolutionary who served as the second President of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970, suffered a heart attack and died several hours later. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Nasser played a significant part in the strengthening of African solidarity and during this period, Nasser made Egypt a refuge for anti-colonial leaders from several African countries and ensured the provision of education and military training for liberation movements in the continent, including the African National Congress (ANC) and our Revolutionary People’s Army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK).
Nasser made Egypt fully independent of British influence and the country became a major power in the developing world under his leadership, as well as a key architect of Arab nationalism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1961, Egypt broke its relationship with the apartheid South African government, and, for the first time in 1962, participated with a further 28 States to present the Apartheid issue in the United Nations (UN) Security Council in order for the policy of Apartheid to be considered as a threat to international peace and security.
Furthermore, Egypt rejected the Bantustan system, which was a tribal-racist border set by the white people through imposing the confinement of the African populations, who were then called as Bantu, and were prevented to e
