Oliver Tambo: Prisoners of Apartheid
(Extracts from a Statement by Oliver Tambo, Acting President-General of the African National Congress, Addressing a Press Conference Organised by the OAU in Addis Ababa, Called for the Release of all Prisoners of Apartheid, 11 July 1973)
“These political prisoners represent, in the words of our late President-General Chief Luthuli, ‘the highest in morality and ethics in the South African political struggle... (men whose) policies are in accordance with the deepest international principles of brotherhood and humanity; without their leadership, brotherhood and humanity may be blasted out of existence and reason; when they are locked away, justice and reason will have departed from the South African scene’.”
“… The entire policy of apartheid is by its own definition aimed at destroying the South African nation by denying its national, multiracial and essentially African identity, and weakening its character and its people by deliberate regressive fragmentation. The vicious racism preached and practised by the ruling minority, the indoctrination of children in schools, the youth and grown-up men and women in every walk of life is breeding hatred, suspicion and fear. The massive and relentless dispossession of peoples, coupled with the denial of elementary rights on the grounds of race, has established all the preconditions of genocide.”
“The applications of apartheid have created the preconditions, and its ideology
