Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Political Maturity
(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)
Political Maturity: The UDF
“The United Democratic Front, that outstanding example of the political maturity of our people, is a product of the years that our country’s forces of progress have spent first to mobilise the masses of our people into action and to draw them into mass organisational formations, second to ensure that these masses adhere to a common political platform and, third, that this political unity finds expression in the kind of organisational unity which enables the people to move as one mass political army of revolution, under one command, focusing on the central question of all revolutions, whether peaceful or violent, the question of State power.
“We take this opportunity to salute the countless patriots of our country who acted correctly and at the right moment, to make the UDF a reality, as a mass instrument of democratic change which inscribed on its banners the fundamental issue which we are about, namely the struggle for the birth of a united, democratic and non-racial South Africa.
“Over the years, as we worked to build this mass political army of revolution, it became ever clearer that the entire progressive movement of our country had a responsibil
