Oliver Tambo: The Victory Of Our Cause Is Assured

Oliver Tambo: The Victory Of Our Cause Is Assured

(Extracts of an Address by Oliver Reginald Tambo, Acting President of the African National Congress, before the Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 26 October 1976).

“For the first time in the history of the United Nations, a representative of the majority of the people of South Africa has been allowed and invited to share this prestigious rostrum with the representatives of the independent and sovereign nations and peoples of the world. … After three-and-a-quarter centuries of the most brutal national oppression suffered by any people on the African continent, our people, the indigenous majority, are asserting their will to be free with breathtaking heroism.

“There is no vocabulary to describe the nobility and the pathos of the conscious sacrifices that the black youth of South Africa have made over the last four months to free themselves, their people and their country from forces that are determined to keep us forever their chattels. Together with their mothers and their fathers they have seen hundreds of their compatriots pay the supreme sacrifice rather than accept a life of enslavement.”

“As revolutionaries we are moved to speak out daily, as we must, to salute these extraordinary sacrifices, wherever they occur. Again, as we must, we use extraordinary words to describe these sacrifices. They are heroic, they are selfless, they are noble. … Shall we say the black people of South Africa have performed a heroic deed and leave it at that? We say no. No words are necessary at all. The blood that our people have shed calls for action, not for more words. It calls for action to destroy the fascist regime that continues to massacre the innocent.”

“Like all other patriots, we love our country and its peoples—all its peoples. It is a varied land of snowcapped mountain peaks, of deserts and subtropical greenery covering vast mineral resources. Its warm seas to the east and cold ones to the west contain also large animal and mineral resources. Our peoples, with their varied cultures which are continuously mingling and interacting to their mutual enrichment, exhibit, despite their conditions, a great love for life and a sensitive joy in the creative and humane endeavours of the peoples of the world, without exception. These ordinary, industrious and peaceful people want to revolutionize themselves and their country.”

“As a colonised people we not only assert our right to rebel against the coloniser: We assert also our right to determine for ourselves the means and methods to use to liberate ourselves and our country as well as our right to determine what to do with our liberation. We have a vision of, and we fight for, a future South Africa in which national oppression will be abolished once and for all, in which racism in whatever form it rears its ugly head will be suppressed with all the might of popular power. We fight to restore power to the hands of the people.”

“Our national democratic revolution therefore has the task also of liberating even these our oppressors. We fight also for a South Africa whose wealth will be shared by its people equitably. We fight to abolish the system which obtains in our country today and which concentrates almost all productive wealth in the hands of a few, while the vast majority exists and toils to enlarge that wealth.”

“The victory of our cause is assured. As no force was able to deny the peoples of Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau their right to national self-determination, equally no force will be able to deny us our liberation. The peoples of Zimbabwe and Namibia will be free sooner rather than later, and so will the people of South Africa.”

Source:
Oliver Tambo, “The Victory Of Our Cause Is Assured”, Sechaba, Vol. 11, Second Quarter 1977, pp. 6 – 17.

Castro Khwela
Good morning fellow Compatriots!🙏🏾✊🏾👊🏾