Oliver Tambo: Prisoners of Apartheid

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 and manifestations establish the intent to commit genocide. The right of the African people to live together as family units is denied by the apartheid regime – wives are separated from husbands, whilst children may not live with their mothers. Even the taxation system does not recognise wives or children as dependents of African workers.”

“Nearly nine-tenths of the surface area of South Africa has been appropriated by law for whites only, as has 70 per cent of the wealth of the country, with not unexpected consequences for the health and well-being of our people. Is it genocide only when one starts to put children in gas ovens? Is it not equally extermination if you deliberately create conditions in which more than 50 per cent of African children in one reserve in South Africa die before reaching the age of five?”

“Over the years, in attempting to defend its posture of defiance of universally held concepts of equality and justice, South Africa has not hesitated to commit aggression, and is now a threat to the peace of Africa and the world. The threat arises not merely from the fact that apartheid is a crime against humanity and the deliberate glorification of racism and fanatic maintenance of white domination is a serious provocation to all the peoples of the world who have suffered or been witness to the practices of the herrenvolkism and colonialism.”

“The threat arises because the imperatives of the South African economy impel South Africa along the path of expansion. South Africa is an intrinsic part of the imperialist world, but it now needs to expand in its own right. Its economy, based on the cheap labour pool created by the apartheid system, now requires the export of capital and needs new expanding markets outside its borders. If it is to survive as it is, South Africa needs to expand, and unless stopped, will do so, either by extending its sphere of influence through neo-colonial trade and aid agreements or by direct aggression.”

– Oliver Tambo, “Prisoners of Apartheid”, Sechaba, Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1973, pp. 4 – 6.

Castro Khwela
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