Oliver Tambo: “We Congratulate Our People”
(Statement by ANC President Oliver Reginald Tambo on the Outcome of the Anti-Republic Day Campaign, Luanda, Angola, 31 May 1981).
“… We started this year with a session of the racist Parliament which characteristically excluded any sort of participation by the majority of the people of South Africa, particularly the Blacks. Towards the end of the session, to be precise on the 29th of January (I think the 28th) a general election was announced.
“The following day by way of preparing the ground for the unity of the racist forces in our country, the regime sent a commando across the borders of our country into Mozambique, there to massacre members of the African National Congress. They were being sacrificed in order to ensure that the racists supported the regime.
“Then came the election campaign in which the majority – the Blacks – were onlookers. The issues discussed in the elections were about the future of our country, our future. A general election took place at the end of April and then started the month of the celebrations. In all this, up to the end of April, we were treated as if we did not exist. But then we were expected to celebrate that very non-existence. This is why at the beginning of the year in our annual message to the people of South Africa, we declared: There was nothing to celebrate and that we should boycott the celebrations.
“To celebrate twenty years of the republic was to add an
