Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Year of the Charter
(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)
Year of the Charter
“Our observance of 1980 as the Year of the Charter was an important stepping stone in the process of that preparation for victory. The struggles of the previous ten years had resulted in the activities of millions of our people and the formation of many democratic organisations. Many of the struggles that our people had waged were around local issues. The situation had therefore arisen in which it was necessary and possible to bring the mass movement together, to influence it to act as one and to focus the minds of our people beyond local to national issues.
“To produce these results it was necessary that we should in the first instance, achieve the political unity of the masses of our people and their democratic movement – therefore what better to do in observing the 25th anniversary of the Freedom Charter than getting the masses of our people, in a sense, to readopt the Charter as their perspective of the South Africa they were fighting for, their lodestar, as we said when we proclaimed the Year of the Charter.
“As we have said, it was also during this year that the struggle for the release of political prisoners took root within the democratic movement a
