Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Unity of Forces for Regrouping and Recovery

Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Unity of Forces for Regrouping and Recovery

(Portions of the Political Report of the National Executive Committee to the National Consultative Conference, which was presented by the President of the African National Congress, Oliver Tambo, 17 June 1985, Kabwe, Zambia)

Unity of Forces

“Taking into account the collective experience of our people, our principled positions and the tasks of our revolutionary movement, our Conference will also have to address itself to the question of the unity of the motive forces of our revolution and the need, at all times, to take correct positions on the national question.

“We should also draw attention to the fact, whose organisational and operational implications will be spelt out in the NEC report as presented by the Secretary General, that the Morogoro Conference viewed our struggle as politico-military. The Revolutionary Council was mandated to conduct such a struggle. The document on strategy and tactics adopted at the Morogoro Conference discussed at length the issue of the relationship between the political and military struggles, emphasising the primacy of the former.

“In the actual conduct of our struggle in the period up to 1974, we concentrated on political work, especially on the task of establishing contact with our people at home and rebuilding our organised presence inside the country. On the military side, we also emphasised organisational work, namely, the building up of Umkhonto we Sizwe inside the country in terms of both men and materials.

“We raise this question because we shall have to discuss it once again, but in the light of our experience, the current situation and our perspectives. This issue bears not only on the conduct of our struggle inside the country, but also on such questions as our structure, the training and deployment of cadres and the exercise of the function of leadership. Thus, we need maximum clarity on this issue so that we can proceed towards the seizure of power in the most effective and efficient manner possible.

“When we entered the second five-year period after the Morogoro Conference, we were better prepared to face the challenges that this period posed. With the benefit of hindsight, we could possibly describe the years 1969–74 as, for us, the Period of Regrouping and Recovery.

Reversal and Reconstruction

“It was during this period that we fully took into account the fact that our reverses at home, particularly during the years 1963–1965, compounded by the death of our late President, Chief A. J. Luthuli in 1967, had imposed on our External Mission the task of representing and leading our movement as a whole, including its internal units. We had to carry out the process of reconstruction from outside.

“There were no structures inside the country to receive the units of the Luthuli Detachment that had trained outside. It was the response to this reality, the fact that this External Mission took on those internal tasks in a serious and determined manner that gave the period 1969–74 its distinctive character and enabled us to recover the possibility to move further forward, confidently, to exploit the greater possibilities that emerged in the next five-year period.

“We could perhaps characterise this latter phase as a Period of Consolidation and Further Advance. It was a period during which our movement worked to defend the gains we had made and to use those gains further to step up the struggle, finally to liquidate the achievements that the enemy had scored when it launched its campaign of extreme reaction in the early Sixties.

“When the NEC considered the implications of the accessions to power of FRELIMO and the MPLA in their respective countries, it concluded that there has emerged in southern Africa a new kind of State power. Fundamentally new types of property were being established, and consequently new social relations were emerging. For the peoples of southern Africa, Mozambique and Angola were the latest examples demonstrating that exploitative relations are a transitional phase in the development of human society.

“We were convinced that the option made by Angola and Mozambique for socialist orientation of development was viewed by the imperialists as a declaration of war on their economic and ideological positions in a region that has traditionally been one of their preserves on the continent. Imperialism was therefore bound to use all means and methods at its disposal to seek to destroy the popular power that had come into being in our subcontinent.

“We also concluded that the white minority regimes of Salisbury and Pretoria, together with their imperialist allies, saw in SWAPO, the Patriotic Front and the ANC, liberation movements that were determined to dismantle the colonial economic structures and install a new socio-economic order in the region. We were certain that the imperialists knew that such a victory would put an end to the continued plunder of our region by international capital and reinforce the advances made in Angola and Mozambique towards complete national and social emancipation.” (To be continued)

– Oliver Tambo (17 June 1985) –

Source:
Oliver Tambo, “The Eyes of Our People are Focussed on this Conference”, Sechaba, October 1985, pp. 2 – 9.

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