Oliver Tambo: The Victory Of Our Cause Is Assured
(Extracts of an Address by Oliver Reginald Tambo, Acting President of the African National Congress, before the Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 26 October 1976).
“For the first time in the history of the United Nations, a representative of the majority of the people of South Africa has been allowed and invited to share this prestigious rostrum with the representatives of the independent and sovereign nations and peoples of the world. … After three-and-a-quarter centuries of the most brutal national oppression suffered by any people on the African continent, our people, the indigenous majority, are asserting their will to be free with breathtaking heroism.
“There is no vocabulary to describe the nobility and the pathos of the conscious sacrifices that the black youth of South Africa have made over the last four months to free themselves, their people and their country from forces that are determined to keep us forever their chattels. Together with their mothers and their fathers they have seen hundreds of their compatriots pay the supreme sacrifice rather than accept a life of enslavement.”
“As revolutionaries we are moved to speak out daily, as we must, to salute these extraordinary sacrifices, wherever they occur. Again, as we must, we use extraordinary words to describe these sacrifices. They are heroic, they are selfless, they are noble. … Shall we say the black peop
