Oliver Tambo: Church and Our Struggle
(Extracts from a Statement by the President of the African National Congress of South Africa, O.R. Tambo, at the World Consultation of the World Council of Churches, Holland, 16 – 21 June 1980)
“Racism in South Africa is also a product of the colonisation of our people by European powers. In all the phases of its development, from the settlement of our country by Dutch mercantile interests, through the stage of direct British colonial rule to the post-1910 period of administration of our country by a white settler minority, racism has served three principal purposes.”
“The first was to justify the seizure of our country, our land and wealth by the colonisers. The second was to establish the basis for the transformation of the dispossessed millions of our people into instruments of labour for the enrichment of the colonisers. The third was to legitimise the exclusive concentration of political power in the hands of the colonial and settler oligarchy.”
“The system has allowed of no overlapping between the coloniser and the colonised. The owners of wealth, the exploiters of our labour and the governors of our country are drawn exclusively from among the colonisers. The colonised constitute the masses of the impoverished, the exploited and the voiceless. The colonisers are of course white and the colonised, black. This system is unique in world politics in the clarity and rigour of its racist demarcations, its pursuit
