A celebration of our continent
and its peoples
On Sunday,
May 25, we will mark Africa Day, the anniversary of the foundation of
the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). But this will be a special Africa
Day, as it will be the 40th Anniversary of the OAU.
A worthy predecessor of the African Union (AU), we are
proud of the role the OAU played to help create the conditions for us
to advance to the establishment of the AU, and the initiation of its development
programme, NEPAD. Africa Day must therefore be an occasion when we celebrate
what would have been the fortieth birthday of our first continental organisation.
Beyond this, Africa Day provides us with the opportunity
to celebrate our continent and our peoples. For us, as Africans, Africa
Day means that our entire continent has an opportunity to join together
in a united affirmation of our confidence in ourselves, and our future.
The OAU was born after an intense struggle had raged
throughout Africa about which of two postures our continent would adopt,
in the new situation of the collapse of colonialism and the accession
of our countries to independence. This led to the emergence of the competing
Monrovia and Casablanca groups, representing the 'conservative' and the
'radical' tendencies in the African liberation struggle.
But in the end, independent Africa decided that our
continent faced a common challenge about which there was no disagreement.
Now that Africa was progressing towards its total emancipation, our leaders
and peoples realised that they shared a common determination to work for
the achievement of the goal of African unity.
This was a direct negation of what colonialism had done,
to separate Africans one from the other, detached from one another by
colonial boundaries that were born of bargains struck among European imperialist
powers, and imposed on the peoples of Africa.
Throughout the painful period of colonial domination,
and the necessary emergence of country-specific movements for national
liberation within the entities defined by the colonial boundaries, the
peoples of our continent never lost their sense of being African. Their
shared suffering at the hands of the colonial powers, and the fact that
they were united by their common struggle for national liberation, reinforced
the sense of a common identity as Africans.
This sense of common identity was reinforced by the
positions independent Africa took from the very start, that no African
country could be genuinely free until all African countries secured their
liberation. At the forefront of this perspective were important African
leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, King Mohamed V of Morocco, Modibo
Keita of Mali, Abdel Gamal Nasser of Egypt, Emperor Haile Selassie of
Ethiopia, Sekou Toure of Guinea, and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria.
It is a matter of great honour and pride to us that
Ahmed Ben Bella, the last remaining founder of the OAU, will be with us
as we celebrate its 40th anniversary. We are also very pleased that the
President of Mali and successor to Modibo Keita, will also join us on
Africa Day.
The positions taken by the founders of the OAU emphasised
the perspective of the shared destiny of the peoples of Africa. It highlighted
the correctness and central importance of the historic motto of the progressive
trade union movement of our country - an injury to one is an injury to
all!
This OAU position was of critical importance to the
advancement of our own struggle. As the apartheid regime resorted to extreme
repression, starting with the banning of our movement in 1960, independent
Africa provided us with a rear base. This enabled us to defeat the enemy
offensive and to position ourselves to resume the counteroffensive that
finally led to the victory of the democratic revolution in 1994.
We must salute the OAU for its contribution to this
historic outcome. It established the political basis that informed the
approach of its member states to the struggle for the total liberation
of Africa, including our country. It created its own Committee for the
Liberation of Africa, the Liberation Committee, which played a critical
role as a partner of all the African liberation movements, including our
own.
For us, the celebration of the OAU must necessarily
also be a moment to pay special salute to the OAU Liberation Committee.
It will give us the possibility to acknowledge the early support we received
from a number of African countries, as soon as we reached out to them
after the banning of our movement and the decision to resort to armed
struggle.
Morocco, Algeria, Egypt and Ethiopia did not hesitate
to extend support to us as we began the process of building the people's
army, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Tanganyika, and later, Tanzania, provided us
with the possibility to establish the first headquarters of our External
Mission. Our headquarters later moved to Lusaka, Zambia, where it remained
for two decades.
The occasion of the celebration of the 40th anniversary
of the OAU will also give us an opportunity to pay a special tribute to
the countries of Southern Africa. In addition to Tanzania and Zambia,
these include Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.
We should never forget that the countries and peoples
of our region made enormous sacrifices to contribute to our liberation.
They lost lives and property and had their possibilities for development
severely undermined, because of the campaign of aggression and destabilisation
conducted by the apartheid regime to compel them to abandon their support
for the liberation of our people.
However, despite the terrible pain they had to bear,
they never departed from the perspective pronounced by the OAU at its
foundation - that they could not be free until our own people were free.
Through its criminal actions, the apartheid regime made certain that our
sister peoples understood this clearly, that they could only enjoy peace,
stability and development once we joined them as a liberated African people.
Our oppressors had thought that terror by a powerful
neighbour would force the countries of our region to abandon their principled
positions and their loyalty to the purposes of the OAU. In the end, they
learnt the important lesson that the more intense their terrorist campaign,
the more determined the resolve of the peoples of our region became, to
help bring an end to the regime of terror.
Our own people, subjected to the same campaign of state
terror, responded as their brothers and sisters did throughout our region.
In struggle, they upheld the perspective of the OAU that Africa had to
be free. In the same way that the apartheid regime and its international
supporters failed to intimidate the countries and peoples of our region,
so did they fail to defeat our movement and our struggle for liberation.
The tribute we will extend to the countries and peoples
of Africa we have mentioned will also cover other countries on our continent,
such as Nigeria, Uganda and Madagascar, which also made special and specific
contributions to our liberation.
We will also have to recognise the role played by the
African Diaspora, which treated our struggle as its own, constituting
an important contingent of the global movement of solidarity with our
people, for the destruction of the apartheid system.
As the modern African intelligentsia in our country
began to emerge in the middle of the 19th century, it raised the issue
of the shared destiny of the peoples of Africa and their need to unite.
One of these, the Rev Tiyo Soga, did not hesitate to express these views.
Soon enough, this intelligentsia, a product of missionary
education and, consequently, converts to Christianity, began to assert
the right of its people to emancipation from colonial and white minority
domination. It was no accident that it worked to constitute its own independent
African churches.
Neither was it an accident that this movement identified
itself with Ethiopia, the one country on our continent that had managed
to maintain its independence even in the face of the determined European
scramble for Africa.
In addition, these early leaders of our people constituted
the Ethiopian Movement to express the fact that they not only sought the
liberation of their people, but also the recovery of their identity and
dignity as Africans, not defined by colonial boundaries.
It is out of these processes that our organisation,
the African National Congress, was born. It came into being as a pan-African
movement, committed to the same objectives that the OAU proclaimed at
its founding in 1963. At its foundation, it drew representatives from
the various countries of Southern Africa. The traditional leaders of our
region became its patrons.
In time, liberation movements in various parts of our
region adopted the name, the African National Congress. When we adopted
"Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika" as our anthem, this became the anthem
of the struggling peoples of our region. Later, many of the leaders in
Southern Africa came out of our movement, including our Youth League.
When the time came for them to make a decisive contribution to our liberation,
they demonstrated that they were unwavering adherents of the pan-African
perspective that informed the African National Congress from its very
foundation in 1912.
In 1962, ahead of the establishment of the OAU, at the
request of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), our movement
sent a group of nurses to Tanganyika, to help this sister country to attend
to the health of her people as the British colonialists withdrew their
personnel, as Tanganyika gained her independence.
In this way, even as we remained an oppressed people,
we made the statement practically, that we were committed to do what we
could to work with our African brothers and sisters to contribute to their
development, as they were committed to do everything they could to contribute
to our liberation. What Tiyo Soga had said, and what the Ethiopian Movement
in our country had projected, in the 19th century, was beginning to find
its practical expression.
The OAU has given way to the AU, as the Ethiopian Movement
gave way to the ANC. The work done by the OAU has given us the possibility
to achieve further advances in the task to achieve the political and economic
integration of our continent. Because of what it has done, today we have
powerful instruments to take us forward towards Africa's renaissance -
the AU and NEPAD.
As our organisation emerged out of the Ethiopian Movement,
and enjoyed the support of the modern Ethiopian Movement represented by
the OAU, so must it now play its role as an energetic component part of
the all-African movement for the total liberation of our continent, which
played a critical role in the achievement of our emancipation.
To achieve the goals of the reconstruction and development
of our country, we have to make our determined contribution to the reconstruction
and development of the rest of our continent, by helping to ensure the
success of the AU and its development programme, NEPAD, including the
mobilisation of the African masses to take the task of Africa's renaissance
into their hands.
As we engage this important challenge, and on the occasion
of the 40th anniversary of the OAU, together we must say - glory to the
Organisation of African Unity! Ma luphakanyisw' udumo lwayo!
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