I say this to make the point that the political victory of 1994 represented such a compromise, which dictated and dictates that the National Democratic Revolution, the NDR, should – while understanding that such compromise represents an important and historic advance – still answer the question of what it should do to continue to pursue its strategic goals. In this regard, with your permission, I would like to quote a famous paragraph in a book by the eminent revolutionary, Karl Marx, which explains some of the dialectical relationship between the new and the old.
In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx said: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service …”
As they engaged in protracted struggle to make their own history, the masses of our people, who sacrificed everything for the victory of the first strategic objective of the National Democratic Revolution, achieved this objective under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. And thus, as we and they were occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, we and they had to take into account the reality we had inherited. The political compromise of 1994 was born of this concrete and historical reality, in which “men do not make history as they please”, which signified both an historic and important advance and the definition of particular objective parameters within which the National Democratic Revolution, the NDR, would have to pursue its strategic objectives. In this regard, as Marx had indicated, the NDR entered into agreements during the 1990–1994 negotiations taking into account the conditions which Marx described as not being its “self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
I would like to believe that it is obvious to all of us that the complex and challenging reality created by this actuality, which was obviously not unique to our country, would pose a particular challenge to our forces of revolution to develop the necessary strategy and tactics correctly to respond to this reality. In this regard, I am convinced that our revolution was very fortunate that it had the possibility to draw on the firm foundation which Oliver Tambo had helped to establish, before he was suddenly and unexpectedly struck down by a paralysing affliction. Relating specifically to the contribution Oliver Tambo made in this regard, I would not hesitate to underline the importance of the exercise of correct leadership at moments of revolutionary change.
In this context I have no hesitation in saying that Oliver Tambo was an outstanding revolutionary democrat, a principal theoretician of the perspective of the National Democratic Revolution to which the ANC is committed, and consequently a central architect of the popular forces which would have an obligation to lead the offensive to achieve this National Democratic Revolution. I would therefore like to thank the Vice Chancellor, Dr Mvuyo Tom, the academic staff, students and workers at this historic centre of learning and research, Fort Hare university, which is Oliver Tambo’s alma mater, as well as countless other African patriots, for giving me the opportunity to speak here today. I say this because I can think of no better location than this particular university, dispassionately to discuss the historic significance of Oliver Tambo’s contribution to the realisation of the vision we share of building a better life for all.
I am also certain that you will realise that what I have just said constitutes a particular challenge to you who have followed in his footsteps voluntarily to become members of this centre of learning and inquiry, the outstanding historic incubator in our country of many revolutionary democrats and fighters for African liberation like Oliver Tambo, from our country and from many other countries in southern and East Africa.
In this context, I believe that we who have gathered here today have no choice but to ask ourselves the vitally important question – what are we doing today, during these challenging times for the future of South Africa and Africa, to ensure that Fort Hare university continues to be the incubator of Africa’s revolutionary democrats and a centre for the promotion of the objective of the renaissance of Africa, which characterise so distinctively the life of Oliver Tambo?
Thus do I return to what I said earlier about the imperative to speak, even briefly, about South Africa as it came to be defined by three and a half centuries of colonialism and imperialist domination. I said and say this because I am convinced that the historical processes which produced that outcome dictated the tasks of our national liberation movement, and therefore the ANC, and must continue, to this day, to inform the central agenda of our National Democratic Revolution.
In this context you would have heard the regular refrain, repeated constantly by influential voices in our county and abroad, including through our domestic media, that Oliver Tambo’s movement, the ANC, after eighteen years as our country’s ruling party, has no right to blame our current reality on our colonial and apartheid past. The firm assertion is made that certainly since 1994, what South Africa became from then onwards was a unique creation of the policies and programmes of Oliver Tambo’s movement, the African National Congress. This assertion seeks to advance the self-serving political proposition that the 1994 political victory wiped our country’s colonial and apartheid socio-economic slate clean, giving the ANC the unfettered freedom to inscribe its own “characters” on this alleged blank slate – to borrow language used during the Maoist years in China!
In this respect I can refer to countless occasions when, in the past, I said that the central and immediate task of the National Democratic Revolution after the political victory of 1994 was to dismantle the legacy of colonialism and apartheid. This evoked major opposition, on the basis of the strange and false argument that the apartheid legacy died in 1994. What is this colonial and apartheid heritage? Among others colonialism and apartheid have meant that democratic South Africa has inherited:
•the legacy of the impact of the most pervasive colonial and imperialist system in terms of the dispossession of the indigenous African majority and the destruction of its communities, resulting in deculturation, the radical weakening of any sense of African identity and the destruction of the traditional value system, identified as ubuntu/botho, which would ensure African social cohesion;
•the imposition of a capitalist system of property relations across the board, originally exclusively for the benefit of the white minority, which has nevertheless educated our entire population, both black and white, to accept the capitalist value system as the only relevant value system which should inform all social behaviour;
•a related culture of violence, based on the notion of individual benefit at all costs, and born in part from the absence of a value system and state practice militating against such violence and the practice of state structures to resort to violence to sustain the oppressive colonial and apartheid system;
•a predominantly landless, propertyless and unskilled African majority, constituting more than 75% of our population, which depends for its livelihood on employment in the public and private sectors, but much of which is “unemployable” because it does not have the skills required by a modern economy and society;
•an educational system that was consciously designed to produce an African majority which would have no skills and impetus to enable it to carry out more than clerical and manual tasks;
•the absence of a rural peasantry with access to land, steeped in peasant productive culture, having the means and capable of sustaining even subsistence peasant farming, therefore representing a significant section of the indigenous majority capable of acting independently;
•the creation of an entrenched social order of privilege and power characterised in the main by an essentially three-layered hierarchy of racial divisions;
•given the foregoing, the construction of South Africa as a state built in all respects as a racist entity of defined unequal racial communities, and the later systematic insertion