Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Global Offensive of Imperialism and A Period of Extreme Reaction
(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)
Comrade Chairman,Comrades, Delegates,
“This day, the opening of the National Consultative Conference of the ANC, is a great and moving moment in the history of our struggle for national liberation. The days we will spend here will live forever in the records of that struggle as marking a turning point in the history of all the people of South Africa. Our Conference itself will be remembered by our people as a council-of-war that planned the seizure of power by these masses, the penultimate convention that gave the order for us to take our country through the terrible but cleansing fires of revolutionary war to a condition of peace, democracy and the fulfilment of our people who have already suffered far too much and far too long.
“The eyes of our people and the rest of the world, both friend and foe, are focussed on this Conference. That is so because the crime of apartheid has persisted for too long. Almost everywhere, at home and abroad, the peoples are saying that the beginning of the end of the apartheid system has commenced. And everywhere there is an open recognition of the fact that this pioneer of the African revolutionary movement
