When the Freedom Charter was adopted at Kliptown, Tambo was the Acting Secretary-General of the ANC. He had become Acting Secretary-General in August 1954, when Sisulu was served with a banning order and required to resign from the ANC.
Although Tambo was restricted at the same time to the magisterial districts of Benoni and Johannesburg for two years and prohibited from attending gatherings, he was not required to resign and was able to guide the ANC in the campaigns against the Western Areas removals and the introduction of Bantu Education. In December 1955, Tambo was formally elected Secretary-General, a post he held until 1958.
After the Congress of the People, the Congress Alliance gained a mass following and an organised presence in every African township throughout the country. It now faced state repression on a new scale and in a new form. In December 1956, 156 leaders of all races were arrested and charged under the Suppression of Communism Act with a treasonable conspiracy to overthrow the government. Tambo was amongst them. The preliminary examination in the Treason Trial began in January 1957, but charges were dropped in stages against the majority of the accused until only 30 remained on trial. Charges against Tambo were withdrawn on 17 December 1957. The trial dragged on for four and a half years, as the prosecution tried and failed to show the policy of the ANC to be one of violence. The final 30 accused were acquitted on all counts in March 1961.
During the period of the trial, the state enforced its own form of institutional violence against the movement and indeed all protesters. There was repression in 1957 when Bantu authorities were enforced in Zeerust and women were ordered to carry passes. There was more repression in 1958 with the enforcement of cattle culling in Sekhukhuneland, in 1959 when the people of Cato Manor protested against pass raids, and in 1960 when the government attempted to impose Bantu authorities in Pondoland. And as the defence was about to begin presenting its case in March 1960, the trial was disrupted by massive police action at the time of the Sharpeville shootings and the declaration of a State of Emergency.
In December 1958, Luthuli was elected President-General of the ANC for a third time, Tambo was elected to the post of Deputy President-General and Duma Nokwe became Secretary-General. But a group of separatist nationalists emerged in the organisation. Their leader, Robert Sobukwe, argued that the only people who really wanted change in South Africa were Africans, whose material conditions were the worst of all. Consequently, in his view, co-operation with whites was unwarranted. He also rejected any form of association with communists, alleging that their influence in the Congress Alliance had led to the watering down of the 1949 Programme of Action. The emergence of this group led to the formation of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in April 1958.
The ANC decided to launch a campaign against passes on 31 March 1960, but they were upstaged by the PAC who began their campaign ten days earlier. The state reacted with more violence. In the Sharpeville massacre 69 were killed and 180 wounded. The ANC called a nationwide protest strike for 28 March. The state responded by declaring a State of Emergency on 30 March and detaining Luthuli and 2 000 other activists, a detention which lasted for five months. Some evaded the police and core groups of the ANC and SACP were established underground which rebuilt an active national network. Ruth Mompati, Moses Kotane, Michael Harmel and Ben Turok, amongst others, survived intensive police searches. Meanwhile, Oliver Tambo slipped across the Bechuanaland border to rouse worldwide protest. He was in Accra, Ghana, on 8 April when he heard that both the ANC and the PAC had been banned.
Mandela summed up the politics of the 1950s in these words:
During the last ten years the African people in South Africa have fought many freedom battles, involving civil disobedience, strikes, protest marches, boycotts and demonstrations of all kinds. In all these campaigns we repeatedly stressed the importance of discipline, peaceful and non-violent struggle. We did so, firstly, because we felt that there were still opportunities for peaceful struggle and we sincerely worked for peaceful changes. Secondly, we did not want to expose our people to situations where they might become easy targets for the trigger-happy police of South Africa. But the situation has now radically altered.
South Africa is now a land ruled by the gun.
(N Mandela, No Easy Walk to Freedom, 1965, p.119)
The stormy 1950s tested the ANC leadership fully. It was a decade of transition from protest politics to mass resistance which had to be guided skilfully by a leadership itself undergoing profound change. Tambo’s steady rise to the most senior positions was indicative of his responsiveness to the increasingly serious political crisis in the country and a recognition of growing confidence in his calm but committed leadership.
The nature of our struggle
(“Passive Resistance in South Africa” published in J A Davis and J K Baker, Southern Africa in Transition, Frederick A Praeger, New York, 1966)
Oppressed people in South Africa have always associated the history of the United States with the great name of Abraham Lincoln. There was an issue involving human rights in his day – an issue that challenged the principles, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. To the honour of his name, his people, and his country, Abraham Lincoln translated these great principles into concrete action.
The US government has made some forthright statements of policy in condemnation of such practices as apartheid in South Africa, where black men and women are held in bondage in violation of the principles enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What puzzles and worries Africans, however, is the opposition persistently offered by the White House to any action intended to put an end to this bondage.
In its historical development, “passive resistance” in South Africa has been closely associated with the late Mahatma Gandhi and his philosophy. As early as 1907, he led the Indian community in South Africa in acts of passive resistance. In later years there were further passive-resistance campaigns by the Indian community. Mahatma believed in the effectiveness of what he called the “soul force” in passive resistance. According to him, the suffering experienced in passive resistance inspired a change of heart in the rulers. The African National Congress, on the other hand, expressly rejected any concepts and methods of struggle that took the form of a self-pitying, arms-folding, and passive reaction to oppressive policies. It felt that nothing short of aggressive pressure from the masses of the people would bring about any change in the political situation in South Africa. As a countermeasure to Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance, the African National Congress launched, in 1952, the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws, or the “Defiance Campaign”.
Before they were finally defeated and subjugated by sheer force of superior arms, our forefathers had been engaged in many bitter struggles against the white foreign invaders and colonial conquerors, both Boer and British. With spears and battle-axes their only weapons, and with shields their sole means of protection against bullets, Africans fought grimly in defence of their land and their national independence. The armed struggle was carried on intermittently for 127 years. In the end, however, the Africans were defeated, totally disarmed, and then shepherded into what are known as reserves. These reserves, 260 in number, are usually in the poorest parts of the country and are utterly inadequate for their large populations.
But wounds could not be licked indefinitely. If the British and the Boers, despite the bitterness of a hard-fought war, could come together in a united front against the African people, why could not the Africans unite and face their common problems and enemy, no longer as individual and separate tribes but as a united people? The answer was found on 8 January 1912, when African chiefs, intellectuals, clergymen, workers, and peasants from every tribe in South Africa met in Bloemfontein and formed the African National Congress. The organisation turned out to be more than a negative reaction to the formation of a union of white foreigners and conquerors. It became the symbol of African unity and gave our people a sense of nationhood that has survived the most determined applications of the policy of divide-and-rule over a period of more than 50 years. Seeing in this organisation a serious threat to their continued political and economic domination of the country – an evil force to be fought and destroyed by all means – the white rulers of South Africa and their successive governments employed a variety of measures to eradicate it. They intimidated and victimised