Oliver Tambo: A Common Enemy
(Extracts of a Statement by Oliver Tambo President of the African National Congress of South Africa to the Sixth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, Havana, Cuba, 3 – 9 September 1979)
“Mr. Chairman, for the peoples of southern Africa, the convening of this meeting in Havana has a special significance, for we can never forget the first occasion in our history when the troops crossed the oceans and came to our continent – this time, not to conquer, rob, pillage and plunder, but to help a people’s fight for freedom, justice and liberation. The unique army that helped the people of Angola to repel the invaders from racist Pretoria came from Cuba, and with their blood they cemented the bonds between Cuba and southern Africa, helped to defend the gains of our revolutionary struggles and laid the foundations for the greater victories which today, some four years later, we can justify claim.”
“But the common objectives that link the peoples still struggling for liberation with those who have gained their independence arise from our shared experience – experience compounded of alien rule and economic exploitation. All our peoples have without exception known the humiliation of living in a country which was our own but which the superior power of alien and hostile forces had annexed and transformed into their patrimony.”
“We have all known the indignity of living under rulers who tried to deny
