Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Heroes and Veterans Remembered

Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Heroes and Veterans Remembered

(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)

Heroes and Veterans Remembered

“… it was however true that in 1976–77 we had not recovered sufficiently to take full advantage of the situation that crystallised from the first events of June 16, 1976. Organisationally, in political and military terms, we were too weak to take advantage of the situation created by the uprising. We had very few active ANC units inside the country. We had no military presence to speak of.

“The communication links between ourselves outside the country and the masses of our people were still too slow and weak to meet the situation such as was posed by the Soweto Uprising. An outstanding role in this situation was, however, played by those of our comrades who were inside the country, many of them former Robben Island prisoners. Through their contact with the youth, they were able to make an ANC input, however limited, in the conduct of the bloody battles of 1976–77.

“Some of them are with us in this hall today. But among them we would like to select for special mention the late Comrade Joe Gqabi, former Robben Island prisoner, member of the NEC and our first representative in Zimbabwe. This implacable enemy of the apartheid regime was assassinated in cold blood by agents of this regime in July 1981 because the racists knew what Joe was worth to our organisation and our revolution. They could see that the seeds he had planted among the youth in Soweto in 1976, hardly a year after his release from prison, and in the subsequent years, were bearing bitter fruit for the oppressors and, for us, magnificent combatants for the liberation of our country.

“The participation of the comrades we have spoken about in assisting to guide the Soweto Uprising, once more emphasised the vital necessity for us to have a leadership core within the country, known by us and in touch with the people, dedicated, brave, with clear perspectives and thus able to lead. The need further to strengthen our leadership structures within the country continues to press on us with ever-increasing insistence. It is an objective that must be realised without much delay.

“We have said that the Soweto Uprising also raised the urgent question of the resumption of armed struggle. Happily, in the period 1977–79, we were able once more to carry out military operations. This was thanks to organisational achievements inside the country, an improved organisational capacity outside and, not least, the availability of cadres whom we could prepare relatively quickly to return to the country. We should, of course, also mention that much of this we owed to the changed balance of forces in southern Africa brought about by the collapse of Portuguese colonialism and the capture of power by our revolutionary allies.

“We cannot overemphasise the importance of these historic blows struck by units of the June 16th and other detachments of the people’s army, Umkhonto we Sizwe. The members of those units, such as Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu have, despite their youth, left us with a tradition of combat and fearlessness which inspires both the young and the old to the acts of peerless bravery which our people are displaying today.

Umkhonto We Sizwe Lives

“Those early actions signalled that Umkhonto we Sizwe lives, and lives among the people, within our country. They signified the defeat of the strategy of our enemy which, for more than a decade, had sought to ensure that no trained unit of our army ever entered South Africa and if it did, that it would never carry out a single operation. They established, in action, the fact that there exist in our country two armies, one a people’s army and, the other, an oppressor’s army. They meant the defeat of all efforts to liquidate the armed struggle in our country.

“By the same token, they signalled the inevitability of our victory. After all, both FRELIMO and the MPLA had liberated their countries through armed struggle. In Zimbabwe, the Smith regime and its backer and ally in Pretoria were running into serious problems exactly as a result of the escalation of armed struggle. The apartheid regime was pouring more and more troops into Namibia in a vain attempt to halt the armed liberation struggle conducted by SWAPO. It was therefore obligatory that, from the small but historic beginnings of 1977–79, we should escalate the armed struggle by delivering bigger blows and on a continuous basis.

“It would be a grave error on our part if we did not, at this point, refer, however briefly, to the socialist countries. The period we are discussing once more confirmed these countries as allies we can always rely upon, a secure rear base without which our struggle would be even more difficult and protracted. To this day, the socialist countries continue to play an important supporting role in many aspects of our work. Always willing to consider and respond to our requests, every day they demonstrate an unwavering commitment to see our revolution through to the end.

“As a movement, we need to be conscious of this all the time and protect our friendship and cooperation with the socialist community of nations very jealously. The forces of reaction are always busy trying to detach us from these countries, knowing very well that, were they to succeed, they would weaken our organisation and our struggle to such a degree that they could then defeat us. The conditions that United States imperialism has arrogantly placed on the independence of Namibia aim specifically to achieve this objective, to deny the peoples of our region the enormous and disinterested support of the socialist countries and thus make us easy prey to continued imperialist domination.

“The return to the internal, we must also report that throughout the period after the Morogoro Conference, we had been concerned about the organisation and activisation of the masses of our people in the bantustans against the apartheid system as a whole, including its bantustan creations. Consequently, we were of the view that, among other things, it was of vital importance that we should encourage the formation in the bantustans of mass democratic organisations, where none existed, and urge that those which existed should be strengthened and activised.

“In pursuit of these aims we maintained contacts in such bantustans as the Transkei, Lebowa, Venda and Bophuthatswana. We are happy to welcome to this Conference one of the stalwarts who, for so long, held high the banner of genuine national liberation in one of these areas, an outstanding leader of our people, King Sabata Dalindyebo.

“It was also in this context that we maintained regular contact with Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of the KwaZulu bantustan. We sought that this former member of the ANC Youth League who had taken up his position in the KwaZulu bantustan after consultations with our leadership, should use the legal opportunities provided by the bantustan programme to participate in the mass mobilisation of our people on the correct basis of the orientation of the masses to focus on the struggle for a united and non-racial South Africa. In the course of our discussions with him, we agreed that this would also necessitate the formation of a mass democratic organisation in the bantustan that he headed. Inkatha originated from this agreement.

Buthelezi’s Personal Power Base

Unfortunately, we failed to mobilise our own people to take on the task of resurrecting Inkatha as the kind of organisation that we wanted, owing to the understandable antipathy of many of our comrades towards what they considered as working within the bantustan system. The task of reconstituting Inkatha therefore fell on Gatsha Buthelezi himself, who then built Inkatha as a personal power base far removed from the kind of organisation we had visualised, as an instrument for the mobilisation of our people in the countryside into an active and conscious force for revolutionary change.

“In the first instance, Gatsha dressed Inkatha in the clothes of the ANC, exactly because he knew that the masses to whom he was appealing were loyal to the ANC and had for six decades adhered to our movement as their representative and their leader. Later, when he thought he had sufficient of a base, he also used coercive methods against the people to force them to support Inkatha.

“During 1979, in one of its sessions, our National Executive Committee considered the very serious question of how to respond to a request by Gatsha Buthelezi for him to lead a delegation of Inkatha to meet the leadership of the ANC. By this time, divergences were becoming evident on such questions as armed struggle and disinvestment. After due consideration, the NEC decided that it was correct to meet the Inkatha delegation, once more to explain the position of our movement, and ensure unity of approach to the main strategic requirements of the struggle.

“An express and agreed condition for holding the meeting was that it would be secret and its deliberations confidential. However, Gatsha announced that we had met and explained the purpose, the contents and the results of the meeting to suit his own objectives, much to the delight of the commercial press of South Africa and other forces in the world that had, in fact, concluded that Buthelezi was possibly ‘the Muzorewa’ of the people of South Africa.

“We have dealt with Chief Gatsha Buthelezi at some length because, although his efforts are doomed to fail, in a way he is our fault. We have not done and are not doing sufficient political work among the millions of our people who have been condemned to the bantustans. The artificial boundaries purporting to fence them off from the rest of our country do not make them any less a vital and integral part of the popular masses fighting for national liberation and social emancipation in our country.” (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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