Oliver Tambo: The Building of a Nation
(Extracts from a Statement of the National Executive Committee on the Occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the ANC, Address by ANC President O.R. Tambo, 8 January 1972)
“After the festivities, activities and holidays marking the end of the year and the beginning of the next, the leaders of the African people converged on Bloemfontein on January 8, 1912, to found the African Nation, to become one people and to continue their centuries-old struggle against whites as one Black people that spoke and acted through the African National Congress which, established on that day, concretised the existence of this nation and gave it form and character.”
“On that day, having reviewed the past, the nation proceeded to work out the strategy of struggle for the future; and as they left Bloemfontein for their respective centres throughout the length and breadth of South Africa and the then Protectorates, a new era in the history of our people had been ushered in, the era of political struggle that was expected to rise through successive levels of conflict till freedom was won.”
“Let us today put to ourselves the question that must be in the minds of our people whenever they ponder their history: what accounts for the fact that we, the first to rise as a national liberation movement in Africa, are now, 60 years later, counted among the very last few whose colonial status has still not altered in centuries? … What explains the fact
