Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Political Maturity

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 responsibility to ensure that the women of our country should be active in this political army in their millions. The ANC Women’s Conference held in Angola in 1981 made an important contribution towards the realisation of this objective.

The Place of Women in the Struggle

During 1984, our Year of the Women, we devoted even more attention to this important issue. Further progress was achieved in the mobilisation and organisation of our women. The position has now been firmly established in our movement that the liberation of women is an essential element and an integral part of our struggle for national and social emancipation. The end of the Decade of Women, this year, does not and cannot mean the end of the struggle for the liberation of women. We must continue this fight and ensure the active and conscious involvement of the women of our country at all levels of our mass offensive.

“In 1976, not long before the Soweto Uprising exploded, we accepted an invitation by the FRELIMO Party to tour parts of the People’s Republic of Mozambique. The purpose of this tour was to help in the mobilisation of the masses of the people to support the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe. The specific problem was that in the areas we had to visit, and did visit, the people wanted to mobilise for the liberation of South Africa and were happy to leave the task of the liberation of Zimbabwe to other areas of the country. Acting together with the FRELIMO Party, we had to persuade these masses that the immediate task confronting all of us was the freedom of Zimbabwe.

Comrades of the Luthuli Detachment

“We accepted the task we were given by our revolutionary allies because as anti-imperialists, as internationalists and as Africans we were vitally interested in the independence of Zimbabwe, a country in which many of our own combatants were buried and where many others had been serving imprisonment or had been in death cells for nearly ten years.

“Some of these comrades are at this Conference today. We salute them and are happy to report to them that even as we seemed to be diverting the people of Mozambique away from our own struggle, we knew that the emancipation of the people of Zimbabwe would return them to our ranks. We wanted to receive them back into our midst with the honour due to them, as we receive them today, as combat veterans who would visit Mozambique to say to these brother people that Zimbabwe is free: now is the time to crack the hardest nut of all, the apartheid regime in Pretoria.

“These comrades, members of the Luthuli Detachment, some of whom had to endure many years as condemned prisoners, still have a journey to make – a journey to Mozambique to complete a task that could not be completed in 1976.

“When Reagan spoke about the destiny of the United States in 1980, he spoke about the export of counter-revolution. Hammered and battered, bled slowly and having confronted the brutal face of the counter-revolution for many years, by 1984 the independent countries of our region had to take some important decisions. The question that confronted them was the same that had faced Africa ten years before.

“The difference between 1974 and 1984 was, of course, that the frontiers of freedom covered almost the entire border of South Africa. With the forces of reaction on the ascendancy in the greater part of the imperialist world, the same question was posed in circumstances in which it was difficult to answer in the forthright manner that Africa had replied a decade earlier.

“And so the People’s Republic of Mozambique signed the Accord on Nkomati in March 1984. At the height of the offensive of the revolutionary movement inside South Africa, externally the same movement had to retreat – and here I am not just referring to ourselves but to the entire liberation and progressive movement of our region and indeed of Africa. 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.” (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!