Oliver Tambo: Apartheid – A Threat to Africa’s Survival
(Extracts of a Speech by Oliver Tambo, Acting President of the African National Congress of South Africa, to a meeting held under the auspices of the Nigerian National Committee on Apartheid, 18 March 1971)
“The strategic objective of the South African racists with regard to the African continent is both short-term and long-term. It is to create client states among the independent African countries, with the aim of cutting off the South African national liberation movement from all sources of assistance; to compel such client states actively to participate in campaigns aimed at our destruction and the destruction of the faith of our oppressed and revolutionary people in the inevitability of liberation; and to ensure the preservation of apartheid by destroying the African National Congress (ANC), the decisive force on the whose shoulders falls the task of liberating the African people of South Africa.”
“The strategy of creating client states is further aimed at cutting short Africa’s strivings to establish for herself an independent and equal position in the world’s economy and the international political system; at using these client states against other African states; and, ultimately, at maintaining Africa as South Africa’s exclusive political and economic preserve. In this connection, special attention should be made of the attempt of the South African regime to establish a so-called ‘Southe
