Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: The Morogoro Conference and the Need for Maximum Unity
(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)
1969 Morogoro Consultative Conference
“Within our country, the Vorster regime was at the pinnacle of its power. It felt that the period of extreme reaction which the racists had unleashed when it banned the ANC, with Vorster as the general officer commanding the campaign of repression, had succeeded to smash the revolutionary movement. The Pretoria regime also thought that it had further secured itself by helping to suppress the armed liberation struggle in Zimbabwe, in which units and cadres of the Luthuli Detachment of Umkhonto we Sizwe had participated with outstanding heroism and skill…
“It was in this situation that the Morogoro Consultative Conference was convened in 1969. Yet when it met it was not in a mood of pessimism. Rather, it was characterised by high revolutionary enthusiasm to confront our problems frankly and squarely and find solutions so that we could further intensify the struggle and, in practice, demolish the misguided confidence that the apartheid regime and its allies shared.
“Many who participated to ensure that the Morogoro Conference was the success that it was are no longer with us. … They left us a heritage of u
