Oliver Tambo
Oliver Tambo Speaks
INTRODUCTION BY THABO MBEKI
FOREWORD BY NELSON MANDELA
COMPILED BY ADELAIDE TAMBO
KWELA BOOKS
“Celebrating ANC President Oliver Reginald Tambo”
THABO MBEKI
(Lecture on Oliver Tambo as part of the Celebration of the Centenary of the ANC, University of Fort Hare, Alice, 19 October 2012)
Principal and Vice Chancellor, Dr Mvuyo Tom, and other leaders of this historic university. Members of council, members of senate and the academic staff. Students, president and members of the SRC, and other formations of the student community. Members of the administration, trade unionists and workers. Members of the community of Alice and its environs and other distinguished guests from further afield. Comrades and friends. Ladies and gentlemen:
We have gathered here today as part of the celebration of the historic centenary of the ANC, a short four years ahead of the related establishment of the University College of Fort Hare in 1916. Understandably, as part of the celebration of its centenary, the ANC decided that it would devote particular months throughout the centenary year 2012 to give the opportunity to the nation to reflect on the contributions to the national cause, particularly of those of our patriots and compatriots who had served as its presidents. Accordingly, we meet here today because of this, to speak about one of these presidents of the ANC, the late Oliver Reginald Tambo, who, if he was still alive, would have celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday eight days from today.
I trust that you will pardon me if I do not use this occasion to succumb to the natural temptation to present to you a truncated biography of Oliver Tambo, which you know. With your permission, given what I have said, I will speak about Oliver Tambo in the context of the historic evolution of the ANC, and therefore the overall liberation movement of our country. However, before I reflect on this important matter, which is obviously relevant to the centenary of the ANC, I must state that I have prepared this lecture deeply troubled by a feeling of great unease that our beloved motherland is losing its sense of direction and that we are allowing ourselves to progress towards a costly disaster of a protracted and endemic general crisis.
Today, as we meet here at Fort Hare, I, for one, am not certain about where our country and nation will be tomorrow, and what I should do in this regard, to respond to what is obviously a dangerous and unacceptable situation of directionless and unguided national drift. Among others, that feeling of unease is informed by questions I have not been able to answer about what happened which allowed the eminently avoidable massacre at the Lonmin Marikana mine in the North West Province to happen. Among others, this tragedy and its consequences seems to have signalled a radical weakening of the national labour relations system which was and is one of the major victories of our National Democratic Revolution, the NDR. This system is based on the fundamental propositions that the state should put in place the policies to help ensure a thriving economy and the equitable distribution of the national wealth, and a system of industrial relations which would enable labour and capital to negotiate the specific agreements which would give practical expression to the objective of shared prosperity in the context of a growing economy.
My feeling of unease is also informed by what I sense is a pervasive understanding throughout the nation that there is no certainty about our future with regard to any of our known challenges, and therefore the future of the nation. This is underlined by a troubled pessimistic sentiment among many families in our country about whether their children can expect a better future, contrary to the travails the parents of these young people had to endure, including the students at this university.
My sense of unease is also informed by the fears I know are shared by many throughout our continent, rightly or wrongly, that they face the threat that because of our internal conflicts, our country could lose its ability to defend its possibility to be an exemplar of resolute African independence, self-determination and African pride, as did Ethiopia during an earlier period of Africa’s struggle for her emancipation. Those fears derive from what the rest of Africa believes is a significant weakening of the binding assurance which our continent thought it had, that our country would, at all times, serve as one of the important continental anchors in defence of the right to self-determination of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora.
I know that what I have just said might not sit easily in the minds and hearts of some circles here at home and abroad, which I would understand. However, I also know this as a matter of fact that it will not be possible to correct whatever might have gone wrong, and therefore address our challenges in this regard, unless all of us have the honesty and courage publicly to state what we believe is true. In this context I am convinced that it would be treacherous to hide our heads in the sand and behave as though we remain on course in terms of the achievement of our shared and various national objectives. Equally, of course, we must be ready to accept such criticism as might result from everything we say, ready to engage in any consequent open debate – thus to engage in the processes for which I have consistently urged, borrowing on the task the great Chinese people set themselves – to “let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend!”
Obviously, such an intellectual contest would have to be based on the firm understanding that those who control the levers of state power would not misuse such control to stifle or suppress any opinion, regardless of its content, and would also not remain silent when others wilfully and recklessly abuse their right to freedom of thought and speech.
I must now return to my required and specific presentation to you about the role of Oliver Tambo in terms of our struggle for national liberation. This means that I must speak specifically about the strengthening of the organised formations and the movement whose actions ultimately brought about the political liberation of South Africa in 1994. I must also speak about the processes and struggles which resulted in the historic compromise which led to the 1994 general elections, and which ended white minority rule in our country and effectively closed the centuries-old period of the colonial domination of Africa and the rest of the world.
I must, as well, pay tribute to the broad liberation movement in our country, in the rest of Africa and the world, not only the ANC, as it engaged in the struggle to defeat the last, best resourced and most stubborn outpost of the global colonial system, apartheid South Africa. For over half a century Oliver Tambo was a central actor in all these processes.
Correctly to discuss the central theses of my presentation, which I have indicated, I must say something about South Africa as it came to be defined by three and a half centuries of imperialist and colonial domination. I have chosen to discuss this history, briefly, because it is directly relevant both to our immediate subject of the role of Oliver Tambo in our struggle, and the tasks we face today of the further advancement of the objectives of the National Democratic Revolution, the NDR, to which he dedicated his life.
I am certain that you understand very well that all this is directly relevant to the historic challenge of all revolutionaries to fight for the revolutionary transformation of society, to create a new social order which would benefit the ordinary masses in all societies. By definition, and inevitably, revolution means that there must take place a titanic struggle for victory over each other and one another, between and among the forces representing the new, and the forces seeking to preserve the old order. Logically, in pursuit of their respective and antagonistic outcomes, each of these contending forces would seek victory over each other, in a zero-sum game. In this regard, I would like to believe that as thinking people, committed to the progressive transformation of our country and continent, you will have made an effort to understand what have been described as revolutionary processes relating alternatively to our seminal year, 1994, and what has been happening, for example, to the African country of Egypt since 2011. I am certain that from both these processes you will have understood that the neat paradigm I have mentioned, of the defeat of the old and the victory of the new, is not necessarily correct in terms of what happens in actual life. Very often, these forces, the old and the new, enter into unavoidable compromises which throw up their own challenges.