Oliver Tambo: Southern Africa in Struggle

Oliver Tambo: Southern Africa in Struggle

(Speech by Oliver Tambo, Acting President-General of the African National Congress of South Africa, delivered at a meeting held in London to commemorate June 26, South Africa Freedom Day, and to condemn the 600-year alliance between Britain and Portugal, 20 June 1973)

“We meet in the wake of great international gatherings concerned with the building of a future of peace, progress and friendship among the peoples comprising the world community. … These great meetings are part of a trend which is increasingly focusing the international conflict between oppressed and oppressor on the situation in southern Africa and Guinea-Bissau. This region of the world, this part of Africa is assuming new dimensions as the battleground in the bitter struggle between justice and injustice.”

“… Britain’s intimate and apparently irrevocable commitment to colonialist, racist and illegal regimes, which have as much contempt for change as they have for human life, is impossible to explain in terms of a residual concept that continues to see the African as being basically an object of European domination and exploitation who must be forcibly subjugated and then exploited.”

“But in the profound changes characterising the alignment of forces today there is an important lesson for all those involved in shaping the destiny of mankind. The resounding victories of the peoples of Indochina have buried for all time the myth, so assiduously cultivated by imperialism, that superior military power is a decisive force in the making of history even when confronted by a determined people fighting for a just cause.”

“Vietnam has demonstrated that the old imperialist policy of force can no longer ensure continued enslavement of peoples. The world forces fighting for national liberation, independence and against exploitation of man by man have proved their supremacy in the field of armed conflict. This has set in motion the great changes in the world scene which further confirm the inevitability of defeat for the forces of reaction.”

“In the course of this long struggle, we have come to know that our enemy resides not only in South Africa, but also in London, in Paris, in Washington and elsewhere; that our right to self-determination and independence, no less than that of our brothers elsewhere in Africa, is usurped not merely by the small white minority class who hold the reins of power over us, but also by the powerful boards of company directors based in the capitals of certain Western countries, who, encouraged and protected by their respective governments, have managed to foster and serve a particularly brutal form of colonialism in our country.”

“I have suggested that southern Africa is becoming the new battleground in the conflict between the oppressed and the oppressor, and that all our enemies are joined together in an international colonialist conspiracy whose aim is to maintain the status quo in our region. For this reason alone, we of the liberation movements are objectively required to recognise the mutual interdependence of our struggles in South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and other parts of Africa. This mutual interdependence equally derives from our historic responsibilities to complete, in collaboration with independent Africa and our friends in the world, the liberation of the African continent.”

“We approach the problems of revolution and struggle in our country with both optimism and realism. We do not underestimate the power of our enemies. At the same time we will never be mesmerised by them nor will we cringe before their strength. On the contrary, we face the colonial and apartheid structures on our continent with the firm conviction, reinforced by history, that, armed with a just cause, flanked and backed by the ever-rising might of the world forces for freedom, peace and justice, nothing but victory shall be the reward for our endeavours.”

– Oliver Tambo, “Southern Africa in Struggle”, Sechaba, Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1973, pp. 19 – 22.

Castro Khwela
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