Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Our Right to Fight

Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Our Right to Fight

(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)

Enemy Counter-offensive

“The forces of counter-revolution which had described the Mozambique revolution in 1980 as an affliction and which had thought in 1969 that the ‘only hope (of the independent States of our region) for a peaceful and prosperous future lies in closer relations with the white-dominated States’, could justifiably claim that they had scored a victory. What had gone wrong? Why was it that in 1975 Africa could resolve that no matter how strong the enemy counteroffensive, we should not retreat and in 1984 be forced to accept retreat? The answer of course lies in the reply that Reagan had given to a journalist in 1980.

“Given the offensive posture of United States imperialism, the Botha regime also felt that, for the first time in five years, the balance of forces was shifting in its favour. Consequently, it resolved that the opportunity had come for it also to go on the offensive, to shift that balance further in its own favour, in keeping with the global drive of its most powerful allies. It thought it was possible to reverse the advances that the national liberation movement had achieved from 1975 onwards and set out to realise this result, acting in concert with the rest of the imperialist world.

“The accomplishment of this task was made all the more urgent by the fact that within our own country our own actions and those of the masses of our people were further deepening the crisis of the apartheid regime which had surfaced with such drama a few years before. To change the balance of forces in favour of reaction therefore meant, and had to mean, that the ANC had to be weakened decisively if not destroyed altogether. By August 1983, we knew that the United States Government was convinced that the ANC would be driven out of southern Africa or completely annihilated if it did not abandon armed struggle, surrender and join the so-called reform process in South Africa as a peaceful political formation.

“The softening up process had started less than two weeks after Reagan was inaugurated as President of the United States. Our comrades were attacked and killed in Matola. Joe Gqabi was assassinated six months later. Griffiths Mxenge was murdered in Durban, the same city where Joseph ‘Mkhuthuzi’ Mdluli had been killed five years before. Ruth First, the Nyawoses and other comrades were killed in cold blood. Our people, as well as nationals of Lesotho, were massacred in Maseru on December 9th, 1982.

“One after the other, patriots such as Neil Aggett, Mohammed Allie Razak, Bheki Zachariah Mvulane, Sipho Mutsi and Andries Raditsela, were to die in police custody, from attacks carried out by the bantustan administrations, from repressive measures carried out by the Pretoria regime, in ambushes laid by counter-revolutionaries in Angola and yet others, not necessarily members of the ANC, but opponents of apartheid such as Frikkie Conradie and Joe Mavi, in mysterious circumstances.

Puppet Forces on the Rampage

“The South African army returned to Angola, where it remains to this day. The puppet forces went on the rampage throughout southern Africa, in Lesotho, Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Where none could operate, as in the Seychelles, the Pretoria regime sent in its own forces, reinforced by mercenaries. Swaziland signed a secret agreement with Pretoria.

“The countries of southern Africa came under intense pressure to sign so-called non-aggression pacts, with the express aims of compromising the independence of these countries and recruiting them to join Pretoria in carrying out police activities against the ANC. The offensive spread wide with the bombing of our office in London and demands by Pretoria that the various governments of Western Europe should close down our offices. In the United States, a veteran of genocidal war of aggression against the people of Vietnam, now turned Senator, chaired widely publicised hearings in the United States Senate designed to stigmatise the ANC as a terrorist movement and an agent of the Soviet Union, exactly to justify a concerted imperialist offensive to destroy us.

“Pretoria scuttled the ceasefire conference that it had agreed to hold with SWAPO. The implementation of Resolution 435 became impossible as the United States arrogantly sought to barter the independence of Namibia for the withdrawal of the internationalist Cuban troops in Angola.

Our Right to Fight

“From the most unexpected quarters we heard that South Africa was an independent State and the ANC no more than a civil rights movement with no right to engage in armed struggle. We were told that we should wage struggle exclusively by political means and seek an alliance with the big capitalists of our country. At the same time, we should distance ourselves from the South African Communist Party and the Soviet Union and reorientate our international relations towards the imperialist countries.

“And all this was diametrically opposed to the positions firmly held in southern Africa and throughout the continent that the solution to the problems of our region lay with the destruction of the apartheid regime and therefore with all-out support to the ANC and SWAPO to carry out their historic missions.

“But fortunately, we had already alerted our people to what was likely to come and called on them to fight on. We had charged them with the task to make the country ungovernable and to defeat the cunning enemy manoeuvre represented by the amended apartheid constitution. And to that call and that challenge our people have responded with unequalled enthusiasm, persistence and courage. So we come to the perspectives that confront this historic Conference, our organisation and our people.

“It is clear to all of us present here that we have the possibility actually to make this our Decade of Liberation. That requires that we must in fact and in practice accomplish the strategic tasks that we have set ourselves and which our strategic objective of the seizure of power demands. We have spelt out these tasks before and publicly communicated them even to the masses of our people. As the general command of our revolution, we should carefully identify the decisive theatres of action on which we should concentrate in order to achieve purposeful movement forward.

“The apartheid system is in a deep and permanent general crisis from which it cannot extricate itself. The apartheid regime cannot rule as before. It has therefore brought its military forces into the centre of its State structures and is ready to declare martial law when the need arises. The widespread and increasing use of the army in the effort to suppress the mass struggle in our country, even before martial law is invoked, reflects the depth of the crisis engulfing the racist regime.

“Despite massacres and murders that are carried out daily by Botha’s assassination squads, the masses of the people are engaged in a widespread struggle which the enemy cannot suppress and which is driving the enemy ever deeper into crisis. Of decisive importance is the fact that this mass offensive is directed at the destruction of the apartheid State machinery, at making apartheid inoperative, at making our country ungovernable.” (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
Good morning fellow Compatriots!