ANC President OR Tambo Denies Secret Talks with Apartheid Government
On 27 September 1987, the African National Congress (ANC) President, Oliver Tambo, denied that the ANC was in secret negotiations with the apartheid South African government. His denial came two months after a former Member of Parliament and leader of the Progressive Federal Party (PFP), Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, expressed his satisfaction with the outcome of discussions held with the banned ANC in exile.
Responding to journalists in a Press Conference held in Addis Ababa, July 1987, Tambo said the meeting in Dakar was “a continuation of a process of contacts which we seek to make, as the ANC, with the white community in our country which is denied knowledge about our struggle, about the ANC itself, and its objectives for the country, as well as the reasons for the methods of struggle we use. The regime seeks to keep this information away from the white community. But we see it as in the interests of all the people of South Africa that they hear what the ANC has, as an alternative to the apartheid system, and that it is firmly supported by the majority of South Africans. And those whites we have met previous to the Dakar meeting have discovered something they did not know about the objectives of the ANC. So, this was a continuation of that process.”
President Tambo was asked further why the ANC had met these white Afrikaners when they, as Afrikaners had had an opportunity to change the situatio
