Oliver Tambo: A Common Enemy

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 us a personality of our own, who decried our history and derided our cultural traditions, who allowed us no names and no future except to the extent that they chose, and such a future as accorded with the perpetuation of their own interests. All our peoples also share the experience of resistance to colonialism. If we turn our minds back to the last decades of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th, we find that with few exceptions we were all engaged in wars of resistance.”

“The forms of our struggle took varied; the uniforms worn by our enemies were different; and the alien flags that flew over our countries were numerous. Yet in essence we have all been struggling against the same forces, and we have all been fighting for the same thing: the right of our peoples to self-determination, to control their own land and wealth, to establish their own political systems and govern their own countries, to organise the economic and social relations in their society according to their own precepts and ethic, to live in peace – guaranteed by an equitable world system of economic relations.”

“These aims are no different from the objectives formulated 18 years ago when the collective strength of the peoples who shared this experience and won their independence was harnessed into the Non-Aligned Movement. These are the same objectives that we share today, though perhaps formulated differently. Thus, … the liberation movements and the independent countries of the Non-Aligned Movement are joined not only by their common experience but also by the fact that they share the present with common objectives and a common enemy.”

“Those who wish to deride the Non-Aligned Movement choose to interpret the term ‘non-aligned’ as something purely negative and suggest that the raison d’étre of our existence is to constantly assert what we belong to no side, to devote our efforts and our energies to walking a tightrope, to become a function of the changing relations between East and West, to submit ourselves to the constraints of a policy of avoidance.”

“It is our submission … that the existence and strength of this Movement lies in its consistent determination to stand firmly, unequivocally and unambiguously on the side of freedom, self-determination and justice and to stand equally firmly, unequivocally and unambiguously against alien domination, dependence economic exploitation, colonialism, racism, fascism, and Zionism – to be totally and uncompromisingly anti-imperialist.”

“We fight for a new international economic order because the privileged status of the imperialist Powers in the world economy is resulting in the continued and accelerated impoverishment of our peoples and the all-round regression of our countries. In apartheid South Africa these tendencies have an impact on our people that is multiplied a number of times over because the political authority that has seized control of our country is itself a representative, a product and an ally of the world economic forces that are responsible for the despoliation of our national resources and the fruits of our labour.”

– Oliver Tambo (3 – 9 September 1979) –

Source:
Oliver Tambo, “Statement by Comrade Oliver Tambo”, Sechaba, December 1979, pp. 12 – 19.

Castro Khwela
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