Oliver Tambo: Against Apartheid Culture

Oliver Tambo: Against Apartheid Culture

(Extracts from an Address by ANC President O.R. Tambo to the World Conference against Apartheid Racism and Colonialism in Southern Africa, Lisbon, 16 – 19 June 1977)

“The battle of progressive humanity for the total and final elimination of the vile and preposterous system of colonialism in Africa has entered its final stage. The inevitability of victory has moved the people on the last barricades of struggle – from the Horn of Africa to the southern most shores of the continent – to acts of unprecedented heroism. In South Africa our people, after more than three centuries of brutal national oppression, are asserting their wish to be free with inspiring bravery.”

“Attempting to give a spiritual and cultural rationalisation for their racism, the ‘thinkers’ and propagandists of the white minority must dig their own intellectual graves. … It states: ‘The domination of White over Black is justified by the regimes through right to this land on the strength of three historical realities: purposeful and uninterrupted occupation and habitation, effective and sustained economic development, and effective and continuous political control’.”

“… The key to understanding the social and political structure of South Africa, we are told, lies in a ‘balanced appraisal of the unique diversity of cultures… and the differing levels of socio-economic and political sophistication’. These differing levels, it seems, are the choice of the black people, not the result of the apparatus which denies them the right to attain any higher level. Was it not Verwoerd who said, ‘When I have control of native education, I will reform it so that natives will be taught from childhood to realise that equality with Europeans is not for them’?”

“But contemptuous of other people’s ability to question their claims, the South African authorities do not hesitate to boast that the whites are ‘culturally the most homogeneous and politically and socio-economically the most sophisticated and most developed of the four major groups.’ The inference is that this sophistication and development are natural to the white people and has nothing to do with their assumption of all the power in the country.”

“Thus ‘black South Africans are not a single, homogenous, integrated group’. They are ‘politically, economically and educationally the least advanced of the four major demographic divisions’ and to emphasise the alleged natural superiority of the whites, ‘history placed the white nation of the Republic in a position of guardianship over these black peoples’.”

“The white racists greatly fear the homogeneity of the oppressed black people. Unity of the oppressed, politically, economically and culturally, is the nightmare that haunts white supremacy, and among its first projects were those designed to prevent any attempt at national unity.”

“A spurious cultural theory tries to justify the policy of divide and rule, by equating outmoded tribal and ethnic groups with distinct nations. Tribal differences are conveniently classified as cultural differences and everybody has been pigeon-holed into geometrically defined areas called ‘homelands’ irrespective of historical realities which show the large numbers of black people long inhabited regions now defined as ‘white areas’.”

“The white rulers insist that each ethnic group is ‘desirous of maintaining its separate identity’. But at no time were the African people, for that matter Coloured or Asiatic people, consulted about this. Blacks were not present in the first legislatures to decide upon their future, nor are they represented today.”

“The struggle of the African majority of South Africa to overthrow the pernicious apartheid regime and white supremacy as a whole, therefore represents the dynamic cultural unity of the people aspiring to genuine nationhood.”

“In the words of the late Amilcar Cabral: ‘The exercise of imperialist domination demands cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect liquidation of what is essential in the subject people’s culture. But this people is able to create and develop a liberation movement only because it keeps its culture alive in the teeth of permanent and organised repression of its cultural life – only because, its politico-military resistance being destroyed, it continues to resist culturally. And it is cultural resistance which, at a given moment, may take on new forms (political, economic, armed) to confront foreign domination.’”

Source:
Oliver Tambo, “Against Apartheid Culture”, Sechaba, Vol. 11, Fourth Quarter 1977, pp. 33 – 39.

Castro Khwela
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