•the positioning of South Africa as an economic outpost of the developed Western world, and therefore a producer and exporter of precious minerals and raw materials, and importer of manufactured goods; and,
•the positioning of South Africa as other than an African country, arguing that it occupies a special space as the exemplar of “modern” human development within a “pre-modern” and regressive African continent.
The imperialist and colonial reality we have just sought to describe was accompanied and sustained, as was necessary, by forcible and exclusive white minority rule. It is therefore obvious that necessarily the ANC as a credible organisation of the African oppressed, even before Oliver Tambo joined it, had no choice but to strive for the reconstruction of South Africa away from the paradigm representative and characteristic of South African colonial reality – which colonialism the South African Communist Party, fifty years ago, correctly characterised as “colonialism of a special type”.
Accordingly and correctly, from the time of its foundation, the ANC set itself the task to end colonial and white minority rule in our country, and indeed our region, therefore to transform South Africa into a non-racial democracy. It would therefore be correct to say that this was the first strategic task of the National Democratic Revolution, which the ANC pursued up to the historic political victory of 1994.
I would insist that the second strategic task of the National Democratic Revolution in our country, consequent upon the political victory of 1994, is the eradication of the legacy of colonialism and apartheid. I would also insist that the third strategic task of our revolution is the entrenchment of a national democratic society, focused on ensuring the permanence of the genuinely democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous society visualised in our Constitution, which would define the long-term character of South Africa, as a truly egalitarian society.
Earlier I referred to the historic challenge that faces all revolutionaries to fight for the revolutionary transformation of society, to create a new social order which would benefit the ordinary masses in all these societies. That challenge of revolutionary transformation has faced and will face the NDR as it has and will confront all three of the strategic tasks I have mentioned.
It must follow from what I have said that I must now return to the matter of the tasks of the NDR, and Oliver Tambo’s role in this regard. In this context I would like to say a few more words about Oliver Tambo, to help explain his role to which I have referred.
Oliver Tambo belonged among a cadre of intellectuals and professionals who passed through the portals of this university, and yet others, including those who came from the ranks of the trade union movement, the traditional African faiths, the Christian churches, the Moslem mosques and the Judaic synagogues, who discharged their responsibilities brilliantly as leaders and activists of our revolution. Like some or many of these, what distinguished Oliver Tambo are:
•an unwavering commitment to serve the people of South Africa with no expectation of any personal benefit: this affirmed a value system at the centre of which is respect for the fundamental principle and practice that leaders are there to serve the people;
•a sustained determination to conduct himself in his personal life so that at all times he would never betray the ethical standards which the masses he represented and led viewed as fundamental to their definition of themselves;
•the commitment, to its fullest extent, of the entirety of his enormous intellectual capacity and personal energy to pursue the objectives of the National Democratic Revolution;
•his ability as an outstanding strategist to lead the broad forces of the National Democratic Revolution through the twists and turns of an ever-changing and therefore dynamic national, continental and international situation, ensuring that the revolution did not lose its focus on its fundamental goals;
•his flexibility as a master tactician of the National Democratic Revolution, requiring the necessary command of detail, which enabled him correctly to identify the tactical manoeuvring which would be imperative to sustain the advance of the democratic revolution towards its victory;
•his capacity to communicate well thought-out, clear and relevant messages to the national democratic movement as a whole about its tasks at all times, which reassured everybody that there was a purpose to their actions and a positive end-game to their sacrifices; and,
•his ability to ensure the cohesion of the forces of revolution by taking all the necessary steps, including through even his personal interaction with the people constituting these masses, which reinforced the confidence of these forces in the apex leadership of the revolution, which strengthened their will and capacity to act as one cohesive force.
I am certain that all of you present here will have understood that what I have just said about Oliver Tambo describes exactly the kind of leadership that any period of revolutionary change needs. I have said what I have about Oliver Tambo to reflect on the kind of person he was, which I would like to believe underlines how rare a leader of the National Democratic Revolution he was, precisely and specifically as such a revolutionary leader. I must also state this frankly, that I thought it important to state what I believe set Oliver Tambo apart as the leader he was, to underline the fundamental point that unless we produce other leaders and cadres of the calibre of Oliver Tambo, it is almost inevitable that the National Democratic Revolution will fail.
Everything I have said surely underlines the reality that the revolution continues, and therefore demands a leadership linked to the masses of the people that is capable of leading this revolution, exemplified by what Oliver Tambo achieved in this regard.
We must therefore ask ourselves the difficult questions:
•whether yesterday the democratic revolution produced and has produced the calibre of leadership exemplified by Oliver Tambo, and therefore whether we, who directly inherited the Tambo legacy, lived up to the demands of this legacy;
•whether we cultivated in the past, including when I served as one of the leaders of the ANC, the leadership cadre required by the continuing National Democratic Revolution; and,
•whether the national democratic movement is doing anything now to develop the broad corps of cadres who would gain acceptance by the masses of our people as their genuine leaders for the further advancement of this revolution?
It was to address exactly this concern that the ANC has continuously put on its programme the task of political education and cadre development.
Accordingly, what I have said is by no means original, because it has been a central part of the understanding and programmes of the ANC for even more than the almost two decades since 1994. In this regard I must accept that during the years when I served in the leadership of the ANC, we failed to achieve the objective of sustaining the calibre of a membership made up of politically mature and committed cadres. This would have insulated our movement, as much as it was possible, from the “staff-riders” who came on board the ANC train, intent to use their membership as a stepladder to access state power and abuse this power for self-enrichment. The real and hard truth is that, in this regard, the current leadership of the ANC and the broad democratic movement, at all levels, have inherited this failure, which lies at the base of much that is going wrong in our country.
To return to the central subject of this lecture, I must take care not to expose myself to the charge that I have presented an image of Oliver Tambo, as I have, without so much as providing even a single fact to substantiate any claim that what I have said is true. Let me therefore do something to address this potential deficiency. Throughout his four and a half decades of active political life, from the 1940s until almost the end of the 1980s, Oliver Tambo played a central role in mobilising and uniting the national, continental and global forces whose sustained united action led to the historic 1994 political victory. This included uniting the old and the young in the mass struggles of the 1940s and 1950s, as a leader of both the ANC Youth League and the ANC, and the later similar struggles, which played a decisive role in achieving the political victory of 1994. This also included the truly remarkable achievement of mobilising and uniting the African Continent and the rest of the