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 assiduousl
