Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Year of the Charter

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 as the Free Mandela Campaign. The combination of these two campaigns, the Freedom Charter and the Free Mandela, gave the active and conscious masses of our people the common political base from which to proceed and enabled them to unite behind the authentic leadership of our people.

“These results, which were and are of decisive importance to our struggle, also meant that the democratic movement was projecting a consistent perspective in opposition to the enemy’s political programme, especially the ‘separate development’ programme, and declaring its rejection of the leadership that the enemy had appointed to help administer its schemes and to pose as the genuine leadership of our people.

“By the time that the 20th anniversary of the proclamation of the fascist and racist Republic of South Africa came, in 1981, we had managed to ensure the political cohesion of large sections of the democratic movement, enough for this movement to act together in opposition to the celebrations that the enemy was planning. More than this, the masses of our people could, on the basis of the Freedom Charter, pose the vision of an alternative democratic Republic to challenge the racist Republic which had brought untold suffering to the majority of our people for two decades.

“This was the first time since 1961 that we had the possibility to test the readiness of our people, in their millions, to act in unity on the fundamental question of State power in our country. The increasing political and organisational unity of the people had already been demonstrated in such campaigns as the Fatti’s and Moni’s, the Red Meat and the Ford Motor Company struggles.

Massive Involvement of the “Coloured” People

“In this regard, we should also mention that in 1980 we experienced the massive involvement of the ‘Coloured’ people in the mass struggle. Of particular importance is that fact that this struggle took place in the Western Cape, the main area of concentration of these black masses and, historically, the main stronghold of Trotskyism in our country. Furthermore, these ‘Coloured’ masses acted together with their African brothers and sisters.

“The stay-at-home, called in the region for the days June 16 and 17 of that year, succeeded because both sections of the black population supported it. Even when the fascist police shot down 40 patriots at the end of June that year, the only result was to weld the ‘Coloured’ people even more firmly to the mass forces of our revolution, committed to the objectives spelt out in the Freedom Charter and loyal to the leadership of our movement.

“This is the period when the Labour Party, with whom our movement had been in contact, responded to mass pressure to the extent of bringing about the downfall of the CRC, declaring its adherence to the Freedom Charter, supporting economic sanctions and announcing its intention to cooperate with the ANC. It is of course clear now that the leadership of this Party, even after it had changed with the demise of Sonny Leon, could not withstand the combination of enemy terror and bribes, and it abandoned these positions. By the time it deserted to the side of the enemy, it was clear that large sections of the ‘Coloured’ population had come over to the side of the democratic revolution and that there was no significant organised political force in their midst capable of challenging the policy, strategy and tactics of our movement.

“The Anti-Republic Campaign of 1981 turned out to be a great demonstration of the political and organisational unity of the democratic movement of our country, an affirmation of the acceptance of the Freedom Charter, our strategy and our tactics and an assertion of the authority and prestige of our movement in the eyes of our people. What the fascists had intended to be a celebration had, for them, turned into a demonstration of how much the masses of our people, including many whites, accepted the leadership of our movement without question.

The ANC Emerges

“At this time, we began to summarise the results of 20 years of struggle by saying that the people had lifted the ban on the ANC and imposed on our situation their own system of legality. This was an expression of the inevitable process of our emergence, in practical political terms, as the alternative power, the formation which commands the loyalty of the majority of the population of our country.

“1981 was, for us, the Year of the Youth. Nevertheless, it was dominated by the events of which we have just spoken, as well as by the rejection by the Indian people of the South African Indian Council on the same basis and to the same extent as our people had rejected the racist Republic of South Africa.

“Despite what we have said, it is also equally true that, five years after the Soweto Uprising and 20 years after the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, our youth was in the forefront of our struggle as never before. In particular, they had carried the armed struggle forward in a manner and with results which enormously expedited the political outcome that we have been talking about.

“An American publication issued in 1981 has this to say: ‘As South Africa enters the 1980s, perhaps the most dramatic trend in black politics is the resurgence of the African National Congress. The ANC’s renewed prominence was symbolised on the night of June 1, 1980, by the glow from burning SASOL oil-from-coal plants, which could be seen by people in Johannesburg, some fifty miles away.’

“It quotes the Rand Daily Mail as saying that: ‘South Africa has entered a state of revolutionary war’. Proud inheritors of the patriotic traditions and fearlessness of the heroes of Isandlwana, whose centenary we had celebrated in 1979, the youth not only made our armed struggle a matter of daily life in South Africa during the first half of the Decade of Liberation. They, together with the rest of our people, ensured that the combatants who died in the front line, such as those who fell in Silverton, vilified by the enemy as terrorists, were buried as great heroes.

“During 1982, the historic 70th anniversary of the ANC gave us the opportunity, once more, to celebrate the memory of these and other heroes and to take up the theme of Unity in Action of all the oppressed masses and the democratic movement that has been the hallmark of the ANC since it was founded. Unity in Action and United Action, which was our main slogan for 1983, constituted a perspective which we put in front of the masses of our people to encourage them to proceed beyond temporary alliances to stable and continuous coordination of the common offensive for the overthrow of the apartheid regime.” (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.

Castro Khwela
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