Oliver Tambo: Increase Our Striking Power

Oliver Tambo: Increase Our Striking Power

(Extracts of a Statement by O.R. Tambo, Acting President-General of the African National Congress of South Africa to the 9th Extraordinary Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organisation of African Unity, held in Dar es Salaam, 7 – 10 April 1975)

“At the outset of our discussion on South Africa, let us endeavour to establish a common understanding of what the true nature of apartheid is and hence, what the real issues before this meeting are. Apartheid has often been equated with racialism. We need however, to understand that racialism cannot be separated from the political oppression and economic exploitation of the black people. It serves both and is in turn sustained by both. It is an integral part of a socio-economic system peculiar to South Africa, but one which has all except the geographic features of colonialism.”

“The difference between South Africa and other systems of colonialism is, therefore, that in South Africa, coloniser and colonised live side by side within the same country. Colour and race are used as a dividing line between the resident white army of occupation and their subject population – the black people. The extreme exploitation of labour is the raison d’étre of this system. A vast apparatus of restrictive laws and practices, coupled with the dispossession of Africans from their land ensures the availability of cheap and forced labour. Above all, as a fundamental condition of its survival, the apartheid regime maintains a complete monopoly of State power and seeks by terrorist methods to make the people acquiesce in their own servitude.”

“African nations … are not unfamiliar with this colonialist pattern, for in their own countries there have been played many variations of the exploitation of the African peoples under colonial rule. In South Africa the methods have been more intensely applied and the repression more severe because of the relatively large concentration of the oppressor within the country aided and abetted by powerful international financial interests. Therefore, the problem that Africa has to face in South Africa is essentially a colonial problem and like colonialism elsewhere it has to be removed root and branch. Attempts to bring about reform within the existing system can never provide a satisfactory solution and can never be a substitute for resolute anti-colonialist struggle for national liberation.”

“… The issue before us … is not how to reform apartheid. The changes we seek in South Africa are not encompassed by being able to share a park bench with a white man, or to be allowed to enter an all-white theatre. We demand a fundamental transformation whereby, in our country, we shall have the same right of self-determination which free Africa has won for itself, which peoples fighting colonialism have won elsewhere in the world. That right is not negotiable. Yet this is the one fundamental change that the system can never voluntarily concede, for upon the continued denial of any access to State power depends the very structure of apartheid. The objective of our struggle must therefore be the seizure of that power.”

“As Comrade Samora Machel, President of FRELIMO, stated in his historic and stirring message on the occasion of the Investiture of the Transitional Government of Mozambique: ‘To decolonise the State means essentially to dismantle the political, administrative, cultural, financial, economic, educational, juridical and other systems which, as an integral part of the colonial State, were solely designed to impose foreign domination and the will of the exploiters on the masses.’”

“Finally, and above all, the OAU must call upon all the member States and the world to spare no effort in helping increase the striking power of our liberation movement in the struggle for the seizure of power in South Africa … Time and the irreversible course of events are, however, working in our favour. The revolutionary mood of the oppressed masses of our country is surging forward. The whole of democratic mankind is on our side.”

We shall win!

– Oliver Tambo (7 – 10 April 1975) –

Source:
Oliver Tambo, “Increase Our Striking Power”, Sechaba, Vol. 9, No’s 6-7, June-July 1975, pp. 2 – 4.

Castro Khwela
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