Oliver Tambo: The Building of a Nation

Oliver Tambo: The Building of a Nation

(Extracts from a Statement of the National Executive Committee on the Occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the ANC, Address by ANC President O.R. Tambo, 8 January 1972)

“After the festivities, activities and holidays marking the end of the year and the beginning of the next, the leaders of the African people converged on Bloemfontein on January 8, 1912, to found the African Nation, to become one people and to continue their centuries-old struggle against whites as one Black people that spoke and acted through the African National Congress which, established on that day, concretised the existence of this nation and gave it form and character.”

“On that day, having reviewed the past, the nation proceeded to work out the strategy of struggle for the future; and as they left Bloemfontein for their respective centres throughout the length and breadth of South Africa and the then Protectorates, a new era in the history of our people had been ushered in, the era of political struggle that was expected to rise through successive levels of conflict till freedom was won.”

“Let us today put to ourselves the question that must be in the minds of our people whenever they ponder their history: what accounts for the fact that we, the first to rise as a national liberation movement in Africa, are now, 60 years later, counted among the very last few whose colonial status has still not altered in centuries? … What explains the fact that we, who resisted Africa’s White invader with arms in countless battles for over 100 years, have now become the motionless background against which the activities of others stand out in bold relief – why are we the still platform on which they dine, feast and dance and who call us ‘Bantus’? This is surely one of the rarest questions that a people could put to itself at the end of sixty years of continuous and courageous struggle and sacrifice.”

“The answer cannot be quick or easy. But it must be found – and found. not in words but in deeds, in action in struggle. … And as we assemble on each of these anniversaries, let us bring with us solid evidence of the emerging answer, vividly written in the record of our work and achievements between now and then. … It will surely be part of the great answer for the Black man in our country to begin, this year, to recognise himself for the giant among giants that he is – a giant at least in his own Africa, on his own soil, if nowhere else. We must assert his imposing stature.”

“… We must reject the role of slave who is told whom to work for and what meagre wages to accept. We must be workers by will not convicts sentenced to hard labour by whites for the offence of being what they derogatorily call ‘Bantu’. We must take renewed pride in our Black skin and defend it against insults and indignities. In thus asserting our stature and our dignity as men in the land of our forefathers and ancestors, in our country and our home, we must not hesitate to return blow for a blow; for many a blow will be rained on us the moment we stand up and declare ourselves full human beings.”

“… It is therefore in the sphere of race that the struggle for power, against racism, colonialism and imperialism begins. For the oppressed in South Africa there is no other realistic form in which to combat racism, for there is no clearer form in which racism in that country has expressed itself. If on occasion the Black man’s struggle for freedom should appear to the onlooker to be racialistic in its form, that will only be because the white man has deliberately, over many decades, closed every alternative course for the Black man.”

“But if the blood suckers of our country appear to be winning one or two new Black co-suckers, the titanic struggle which the militant leaders of Africa are waging against colonialism and racialism in Africa, supported by all the anti-imperialist forces of the world, is gaining momentum from year to year.”

AMANDLA! MAATLA!

– Oliver Tambo (8 January 1972) –

Source:
Oliver Tambo, “Statement of the National Executive Committee on the Occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the ANC, Address by ANC President O.R. Tambo, 8 January 1972”, ANC Archives.

Castro Khwela
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