Oliver Tambo and the Struggle Against Apartheid

"We are of the World and the World is with Us"
Oliver Tambo's address on receiving the degree of Doctor of Laws Honoris Causa from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, May 9, 1986

Time indeed is Running Out
Extract from Oliver Tambo's address to the UN-OAU Sanctions Conference, Paris, June 16, 1986

Apartheid Cannot be Reformed
Extract from Oliver Tambo's address to the International Labour Conference, Geneva, June 19, 1986

Impose Comprehensive Mandatory Sanctions
Oliver Tambo's address to the Royal Commonwealth Society, London, June 23, 1986

Racism, Apartheid and a New World Order
Oliver Tambo's Third World Lecture, Kuala Lampur, May 5, 1986

South Africa at the Crossroads
Oliver Tambo's Canon Collins Memorial Lecture, London, May 28, 1987

India and the Struggle for Freedom in South Africa
E. S. Reddy

APPENDICES

1. "Three Doctors' Pact," March 9, 1947
2. The Freedom Charter, June 26, 1955
3. "Unite! Mobilise! Fight On!"
Nelson Mandela's Call from Prison after the Soweto Uprising
4. Manifesto of "Umkhonto we Sizwe," December 16, 1961
5. Oliver Tambo's Appeal on the Occasion of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the ANC, 1987
6. Measures taken by India for the Elimination of Apartheid
7. Gandhiji's Message to South Africa, May 18, 1947

Acknowledgements

PREFACE

The struggle of the people of South Africa for the liquidation of the barbaric apartheid system is a saga of indomitable courage and unflinching determination. Its shining record of unflagging valour coincides with the entire length of the twentieth century as its vanguard detachment, the African National Congress, celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. This is a remarkable organ of struggle, perhaps unique in history. As the spearhead of the crusade against racial discrimination, it unifies within its ranks and also in its leadership three streams, the African, the Indian and the European, a symbol of the democracy, that it has been striving to achieve, replacing the hated apartheid regime.

The struggle of the people of South Africa and Namibia under the leadership of the African National Congress and the South West Africa People's Organisation has evoked worldwide solidarity, from all continents and every nation, cutting across barriers of race and creed, ideological differences, social and political systems. In this mighty crusade of humanity, millions are actively engaged today all over the world, men and women, young and old. The fight of the heroic people within the vast prison camp of apartheid has been orchestrated with the sustained movement of common people in all corners of the earth as a living symbol of unbroken solidarity with the freedom-fighters in South Africa. This is a unique feature of this struggle, which is today engaged in overpowering the desperate, last-ditch resistance of the perpetrators of despicable apartheid.

We, in India, have a special organic link with the heroic struggle against apartheid. It was in South Africa that the grand architect of our national struggle for freedom from British rule, Mahatma Gandhi, first experimented with his technique of non-violent mass movement, as he raised the banner against racial discrimination, before he came to India. India was the first country, that imposed economic sanctions against South Africa as early as 1946. Since then, the South African people's struggle against apartheid has always been regarded in India as very much a part of our own struggle for freedom, and today a continuation of it, as our national leaders have always enjoined that freedom is indivisible. Until the last bastion of apartheid falls in South Africa, the injunction of our own freedom will not be regarded as having been carried out in full.

The editor of this volume, Enuga S. Reddy, has been an intrepid champion of the struggle of liberation in Southern Africa for four decades now. His record of single-minded dedication to the cause is internationally acknowledged and his never-failing interest in it goes much beyond his record of activities in the capacity of the Director of the UN Centre against Apartheid, holding the post of an Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations. This volume bears testimony to his vast knowledge, experience and commitment to the struggle against apartheid, which he has been actively championing uptil this day.

Adhering to its objective of focussing the media interest on issues of freedom, non-alignment, justice and peace, NAMEDIA Foundation organised a seminar on "Media and the Struggle Against Apartheid" in New Delhi in May this year. It was attended by a wide spectrum of Indian media professionals together with well-known media personalities from the Frontline States, as also leading spokesmen of the ANC and SWAPO. The statement issued at the conclusion of the seminar was meant not only as an expression of the solidarity of the Indian people with those engaged in the struggle against the racist regime in Pretoria, but also an appeal for the greater activisation of the media in our country to focus on that struggle underlining its worldwide significance.

As part of its commitment of solidarity with the struggle against apartheid, the NAMEDIA Foundation is happy to be associated with the publication of this volume. It is being released on the 70th birthday of Oliver Tambo, President of the African National Congress. This volume is presented to him on this happy occasion as a modest token of our esteem and admiration for one of the great sons of the mighty African people.

NIKHIL CHAKRAVARTTY
Chairman
Namedia Foundation
New Delhi October 27, 1987

PRIME MINISTER

MESSAGE

The persistence of the system of apartheid in South Africa constitutes both an anachronism in an era of progressive emancipation and an affront to the conscience of humankind. Concerted international efforts to seek a peaceful end to this manifestation of racism are being adamantly thwarted. The only alternative left to South African patriots is to wage a liberation movement. The African National Congress, which was founded seventy-five years ago, has been the prime liberation movement engaged in this challenging endeavour. It has been inspired in its activities by the outstanding leadership qualities of such distinguished patriots as Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the ANC is, thus, an event of international significance and the decision to bring out this publication has been timely. While the ANC enjoys the unstinted support of all South African patriots, there is a continuing need to mobilise world public opinion against the evils of apartheid and to bring about wider understanding of the consequences of allowing the repressive racist minority regime to rule the roost in South Africa. This publication will undoubtedly contribute towards this objective.

India has been in the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. Apart from our national endeavours to demand the establishment of a democratic polity in South Africa, we are committed through our Chairmanship of the AFRICA Fund to assist the Southern African liberation movements and the ANC in particular and to mobilise world public opinion against apartheid. It is our firm conviction that these combined efforts will culminate in victory for the forces seeking freedom and dignity for the people of South Africa. Oliver Tambo is an eloquent spokesman of these forces. My wish for him on his 70th birthday, which falls next month, is that he should soon see the flag of freedom flying in South Africa.

RAJIV GANDHI
New Delhi
September 28, 1987

ALAS AFRICA...!

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

In an insane time, the long long past
when the Creator himself
gravely displeased with himself,
destroyed his own creations
over and over again,
the ocean with its angry arms snatched,
away a piece of eastern earth, and
called it Africa....

Alas! Africa of shadows,
your human face remains unknown,
to the uncaring game of blue Westerners.

They came:
Human hunters all.
The iron chains,
and claws sharper than those of wolves.
Their pride blinder than your sunless forests.

The barbaric lust of civilised men
revealed in ugliness
of their own
Inhumanity.

HOMAGE TO THE SPEARHEAD

MULK RAJ ANAND

Oliver Tambo!

Hero of Heroes of the struggle against Boer barbarism in South Africa!

Hero of the World, where some men and women believe that we can resist the overwhelming forces of tyranny!

Upholder of the dignity of men and women, of every colour, race and religion!

Inveterate fighter for liberty for your people and therefore for all peoples!

Symbol of the Black people's hope that the Rights of Man will be recognised everywhere!

Faithful to the memory of those, who have perished in the fight against Apartheid!

I salute you on behalf of the many witnesses of your persistent actions in the struggles to right the wrongs!

You have worked for half a century without caring for applause!

You have acted without any sense of glory in obscure areas of your land!

You have not allowed yourself to be shaken in your faith that freedom will come, inspite of all the merciless suppression by the monstrous fascist-racist state power of the South African White usurpers of the vast lands of your peoples!

While the Western intelligentsia, in the cafes of London and New York, were talking of the need to act, in a world where they said "Hell is other people," you and your colleagues, Nelson Mandela, Yusuf Dadoo, Monty Naicker, Trevor Huddleston, Steve Biko, and many others, seized the Truth of Mahatma Gandhi and adopted Satyagraha, non-violent, non-co-operation.

But, when you saw that the passive resisters were trodden under the hoofs of policemen's horses, when you knew that the Boers considered the Blacks to be sons of Cain, to be enslaved, lower creatures, who must not be seen or heard, though they must work for the Whites, whose touch was supposed to defile them, whom they considered to be a mad mob every time they got together to assert their rights - you decided, with your millions of comrades to fight with whatever means might become available.

Mahatma Gandhi's stipulation that means are ends, you saw, can be a valid dictum, when those who oppose have a sense of moral law. But for two hundred years or more, the Boers have practised the Calvinist heresy to condemn the coloured people as vermin. They usurped the lands of the Blacks, appropriated the gold and the diamonds of your beloved earth, and condemned your people as "animals beyond the law." They organised apartheid, apartness, with devilish ingenuity, so as to consign the Black people to filthy ghettoes, while they lived on the fat of the land in roomy mansions. Truly, they have worked out, with the evil genius of Mephistopheles, laws and rules, with care of detail, to organise discriminations, so that millions of men and women and children live in the fantastic "hell in the sunshine," where once nature's bounty was for the sustenance of human beings.

Terror stalks the veld. There is nowhere the rebel can rest his head. The patriots have taken to the jungles. The Nazi norms apply. The state power, helped by the money power of accretive Western cousins is omnipotent. Black worker's rights are smashed up by the biggest police force in the world! Each protest by the people is met with grapeshot! Every year sees a new Sharpeville! Every protest means intenser deprivation of the protesters! No one can go across the boundaries of rejection in a city street! No pity for pregnant women, who might forget their pass at home!

The Calvinist God has abolished Jesus of the Cross. In the name of their own Christ, they wage unending war, not only on the Black, Brown and Coloured People, but against all the peoples in the neighbouring States, which have won their freedom from the White yoke.

You, as the head of the African National Congress, deputising for Nelson Mandela, incarcerated for 25 years in an island jail, lead the patriotic strugglers against the unending war of a relentless enemy.

You and your comrades defy Death, the possible end, because you believe in the battle for freedom. Everyday is a new beginning for your comrades.

Of the two choices, the life of ease and the life of struggles so that you will not be slaves, but free human beings, you and your people have chosen to act rather than bear the living death of resting back.

You and your people have accepted hunger and want to achieve that immaterial thing called Liberty, which is the spirit in our flesh, and which demands, not the satisfaction of senses but sacrifice of every physical need. You know that the body is not mere physique but body-soul, where the will is nourished, so that men and women may become more than themselves, gods. You and your people have shown in your sustained struggle the capacity to bear pain, privation and face the onslaughts, daily, inspite of the fallen around you, inspite of the children howling from their derangement through seeing the torture of their parents.

There is no way back. There are only the tracks in the jungles, sinuous pathways of the struggle for freedom, onto the high roads.

Some of us, in our own vast land, heard the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, in moments when everything seemed dark under the blanket of oppression of alien rule.

"All my life and all my strength are given to the first cause of the world: the liberation of mankind."

You will say the same words yourself till victory is achieved. As you know, your enemies are divided, inwardly if not outwardly, because their centres cannot hold, from the anarchy loosed among them, by competition in the greed for more goods than others.

In your unity, the togetherness, which you have cemented among your people, along with your brother heroes and sister heroines, in the power of your joint will for freedom, is the hope for the future, when your land will receive you back as liberators, who will abolish rejection of one person by another.

Against rejection your will to power can never fail!

I salute you, as one of the men of hope against despair!

OLIVER TAMBO: A TRIBUTE

E. S. REDDY

In many colonial and social revolutions, the leaders of the people had to go into exile to guide the resistance or were imprisoned or deported by the oppressive regimes but continued to inspire the people in their struggle for liberation.

The revolution in South Africa is perhaps unique in that the leadership and inspiration has been provided in a protracted struggle by a triumvirate - Oliver Tambo, President of the African National Congress, who has been in exile since 1960, and Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu who have been in prison since 1962 and 1963 after short periods in the underground.

The ANC has a tradition of collective leadership and significant contributions have been made to the movement by many others - such as Chief Albert Luthuli, Moses Kotane, J. B. Marks and Dr. Yusuf Dadoo - but the continuity of leadership provided by Tambo, Mandela and Sisulu has been crucial.

Oliver Tambo, who will be seventy on October 27th, has borne the burden of guiding the resistance and securing international solidarity for a quarter century but his political life is inseparable from that of his two closest colleagues.

The three men began their political activity during the Second World War when the African youth raised the slogan "Quit Africa," in the wake of the "Quit India" movement led by Gandhiji in India, and were among the founding members of the ANC Youth League in 1944. The League espoused African freedom rather than a mere mitigation of white racist oppression, and called for mass action instead of deputations and petitions to the racist rulers.

The Youth Leaguers were able, in 1949, to secure the adoption by the ANC of the "positive action programme" of demonstrations and strikes, and even civil disobedience. Walter Sisulu became Secretary-General of the ANC, while Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela were elected to the national executive.

The formulation of the strategy of struggle was, however, not easy. For South Africa was no more a colony, since Britain transferred power to the white minority in 1910, but a country with a special system of internal colonialism. The whites, Coloured people and Indians together constituted a quarter of the population. The task was not to oblige an external power to quit the country but to secure the transfer of power from a settler minority to all the people.

Meanwhile, the small Indian community had carried on a great passive resistance campaign from 1946 to 1948 against racial discrimination. Dr. Yusuf Dadoo and Dr. G. M. Naicker, who had emerged as its leaders, declared that the freedom of the Indians was inextricably linked with the freedom of the African majority and appealed for united resistance by all the oppressed people, as well as democratically-minded whites, under African leadership. The Government of India, led by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, made it clear that it sought no special privileges for Indians and promoted international support for the African cause as much as for the rights of the Indians.

The turning point in the South African struggle came in 1950 when the ANC - and especially its militant leaders - became convinced of the need for a united and multi-racial struggle against apartheid tyranny. After extensive discussions and preparations, the ANC and the South African Indian Congress jointly launched the Defiance Campaign - a mass Satyagraha - in 1952 in which 8,000 people of all racial origins went to prison. Congresses of Coloured and white people, and a non-racial South African Congress of Trade Unions, were founded and became part of the "Congress Alliance." The alliance organised, in 1955, a multi-racial Congress of the People which proclaimed the Freedom Charter declaring that South Africa belongs to all its people and urging all the people to struggle for the total elimination of racism.

Walter Sisulu, as ANC Secretary-General, played a crucial role in organising the Defiance Campaign. Nelson Mandela was the Volunteer-in-Chief of the Campaign. Oliver Tambo led the campaigns against the forcible removal of African communities and against the "Bantu education" system, and played a major role in forging the united front.

As the rulers escalated repression to suppress all non-violent resistance, the ANC leadership expected the banning of the organisation and mass arrests of its members. It decided that one of its leaders should go abroad to mobilise international support and action. Oliver Tambo, who had been elected to a newly-created position as "Deputy President" after restriction orders had been served on Chief Luthuli, was persuaded to undertake the responsibility.

Soon after the Sharpeville massacre of March 21, 1960, when the regime introduced the Unlawful Organisations Bill to outlaw the ANC and other organisations, Oliver Tambo escaped from South Africa, together with Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, President of the South African Indian Congress and Ronald Segal. The Indian Government helped them with travel documents and facilities to go to London in time for the Commonwealth Conference in May. After the Conference, Mr. Tambo and Dr. Dadoo visited Delhi for full discussions with Pandit Nehru which led a year later to the exit of South Africa from the Commonwealth.

Meanwhile, in May 1961, a national strike against the establishment of a white racist Republic - led by Nelson Mandela from the underground - was suppressed by a massive show of military force. Tambo then organised a secret conference of leaders of the ANC and its allies in Bechuanaland and it decided that armed struggle had become unavoidable. The Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), a multi-racial military wing, was founded under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, and Tambo had to undertake the additional task of arranging military training for its cadres. Umkhonto organised hundreds of acts of sabotage in the next two years, taking extreme care to avoid loss of life, in an effort to persuade the white minority to rethink and the international community to act.

The Pretoria regime responded with mass arrests of all militants - who were well-known and had little experience of clandestine activity. Through brutal torture and savage sentences under draconian laws, it was able to shatter the underground structures of the movement. Nelson Mandela was captured in August 1962 and Walter Sisulu in July 1963, and both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Chief Luthuli was confined to the Groutville reserve and died in a mysterious accident in 1967.

It now fell on Oliver Tambo not only to promote international action but to ensure the restoration of the underground structures in South Africa and the revival of the struggle, both non-violent and violent.

It is largely due to the respect enjoyed by him, his leadership and his tireless efforts that the unity of the ANC and the liberation movement as whole was sustained and strengthened despite the severe reverses. By the mid-1970s, the underground structures had been re-established and secured. Mass mobilisation against apartheid reached unprecedented levels, while armed struggle developed rapidly with thousands of young volunteers. Tens of thousands of people began openly to defy the law and virtually unbanned the ANC.

Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu remained in prison as symbols of resistance, but the movement found ways to enable them to keep abreast of the situation and contribute to the development of the strategy.

Tambo in exile, and Mandela and Sisulu in prison, are the guiding spirits of the revolutionary upsurge uniting people of varied racial origins and ideologies, combining civil disobedience and armed struggle, and at the same time avoiding undue loss of life. The authorities have been unable to suppress it despite the State of Emergency, the detention of tens of thousands of people, mass torture, even of children, and murders of militants by vigilantes.

International solidarity, too, has advanced tremendously, though a few powerful governments continue to block decisive action, and the anti-apartheid movement has become one of the most significant popular movements of our time.

Oliver Tambo has proved an outstanding leader of his people and has earned respect around the world as a statesman.

I met Oliver Tambo at the United Nations in 1960, soon after he escaped from South Africa and have been associated with him and his family since I became principal secretary of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid in 1963. His broad vision, deep attachment to democracy and non-racialism, tremendous integrity and personal warmth have been a source of inspiration to me. He is of the mould of the great leaders of my own national movement in India and is a great friend of India.

A brilliant student, teacher and lawyer, he sacrificed a promising career to lead the freedom movement. His long exile has been painful, with his closest colleagues in prison, and he had to resist the urge to be among his people as they fight a monstrous tyranny. He could spare little time to spend with his family or to care for his health as the demands of the struggle have given him no respite.

A modest man, he has rejected all honours - and accepted an honorary degree from the Jawaharlal Nehru University most reluctantly - while encouraging the world to honour Nelson Mandela. But he has inspired and earned the admiration of numerous friends around the world, for whom he symbolises the spirit and vision of the great freedom movement of South Africa, and they will find ways to pay tribute to him.

OLIVER REGINALD TAMBO

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Born on October 27, 1917 at Bizana in Eastern Pondoland, Eastern Cape, and of peasant origin, he attended school at Ludebe, the Holy Cross Mission and later at St. Peter's Secondary School, Johannesburg. Matriculating in 1938, he went on to Fort Hare University College, where he graduated in 1941 with a B.Sc. degree. After being expelled from Fort Hare for involvement in a student strike, he obtained his Education Diploma and taught from 1943 to 1947, at St. Peter's Secondary School.

In 1948, he began studying law and started legal practice with Nelson Mandela, who is now serving life imprisonment on Robben Island, in December 1952, establishing the first African legal partnership in South Africa.

He was one of the founders of the ANC Youth League in 1944, and successively its National Secretary and National Vice-President. He became a member of the National Executive of the ANC in 1949 and Secretary General of the organisation in 1955, holding the position until 1958, when he was elected Deputy President General.

In 1954, he was served with government orders under the Suppression of Communism Act, banning him from attending all gatherings for two years and restricting his movements to the magisterial districts of Johannesburg and Benoni for the same period. In December 1956 he was charged along with 155 other members of the Congress Alliance with High Treason. And in 1959, he was served with a further government order prohibiting him from attending any gatherings for a period of five years.

The legal practice he and Nelson Mandela had set up as a means of defending Africans charged with "crimes" was seriously affected. He could not now travel to places like South West Africa (Namibia), as he had done before, to represent the Africans facing political charges and involved in political disputes with the government. A week after the Sharpeville shootings on March 21, 1960 and two days before the declaration of a State of Emergency on March 30, he was directed by the ANC National Executive to go out of the country in order to put the case against South Africa in world forums.

Tambo's role in arousing world consciousness has had an immense impact on international opinion about South Africa. Since coming out of South Africa in 1960, he has earned the respect of many world figures by his honesty and modesty, his incisive intelligence and his historic indictments against the South African regime at the United Nations and other world platforms. So ably has he presented the case against South Africa that he has come to be regarded as a man whose authority cannot be challenged on such issues. He has travelled widely. The esteem with which he is regarded in Africa can be judged by the fact that the movement he leads, the ANC, is regarded as the authentic and representative voice of the Black masses of South Africa. He knows personally almost all African leaders on the continent who have a great respect for his opinions. His speeches have been published and translated into many languages.

He is the President of the African National Congress (since 1967) and Chairman of the Political-Military Council.

THE STRUGGLE FOR A BIRTHRIGHT

FROM PLAATJE TO TAMBO: FROM SEME TO MANDELA

The people of South Africa today are engaged in a desperate struggle to overthrow apartheid and reclaim their birthright. They have rejected the racism of the White minority rulers and the division of their country into different areas. They are determined to win back their national rights and to establish equal rights for all, the right to live and work without regard to race. Above all, they want to win their right to determine their own future and to choose their own government.

The African National Congress, the ANC, represents the authentic voice of all those in South Africa, who stand with them against the oppressor and for the rights of the oppressed. The struggle is not simply one for individual liberty, although it is true that individual liberties will not be won as long as apartheid lasts.

South Africa is unique in the world today in that the majority of its people have no vote and no means of control over their own lives; they are savagely exploited and their labour serves only to fuel the engines of profit for the apartheid system and their rulers. The White minority rulers function like the colonial rulers of past centuries, but with all the apparatus of a modern state, so that the machinery of repression is exceptionally strong and far-reaching.

It is, therefore, a tribute to the majority in South Africa that the struggle is not simply aimed at replacing a White minority regime by a Black majority one. It is a struggle for national liberation, but it is also a struggle to rid the country of racism, to found a truly free and democratic South Africa in which all will have an equal right to live and work.

There is no doubt that the ANC is playing a pre-eminent role in this process. Its flag flies at funerals and demonstrations all over the country, its slogans are popular cries, the Freedom Charter, which was drawn up under its auspices, attracts ever greater support. Internationally, it has also received widespread recognition. The United Nations, the European Community, the Commonwealth, the NAM and many major world leaders (and significantly international big business) have stated that the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela are an essential prelude to any serious efforts to end the terrible trauma of apartheid and avert the holocaust that threatens.

It is now 75 years since the ANC was founded. It is the oldest liberation movement in Africa. In the long hard years of struggle the ANC has grown to become a mature organisation, rich in experience, firmly dedicated to the principles of non-racism, and determined to build a new country, in which all will play their part and the welfare of all will be of equal concern.

To quote Thabo Mbeki, ANC Director of Information, UK, "We are all of us inspired by the confidence that victory is in sight. That is what accounts for the willingness of the people to engage in struggle every day, despite the shootings and the State of Emergency. It's because there is that great feeling that we are winning. We can't put a date on it but it's coming. Surely it must - soon."

HISTORY OF THE STRUGGLE

The African National Congress of South Africa was formed under the name of the "Native National Congress" in 1912. The Act of Union of 1910, the handing over by the British of the four different provinces of South Africa to a "Union" of Boer and British settlers, was seen by Africans as a betrayal. The Whites retained all their colonial powers over the non-Whites, and the way was paved for the Boers, descendants of the original 17th century Dutch settlers, who already outnumbered the English-speaking settlers among the White electorate, to take ultimate control.

It was in response to these events that on January 8, 1912, in Bloemfontein a massive conference was held of Africans from all areas. The purpose of the gathering was mainly to eliminate old tribal rivalries and to unite Africans against the injustices of the new system. A major grievance lay in the system, whereby Africans and only Africans, were obliged to carry identity papers, the forerunner of the hated Pass Laws.

A journalist, Solomon (Sol) Plaatje was elected Secretary and Pixley Ka Izaka Seme, a lawyer educated in New York and Oxford, become Treasurer. These leaders developed a programme of constitutional protest against the colour bar, which prevented Africans from taking any significant part in the political, administrative or economic life of the country. The Congress, with Sol Plaatje as its main spokesman, lobbied at the imperial government in London, in particular that the 1913 Land Act, which reserved more than 80 per cent of the land for 13 per cent of the population, should be scrapped. The British refused to disallow the legislation.

Following the First World War, the focus of resistance to White domination widened from the Pass Laws to include labour disputes and the ANC became closely associated with Clements Kadalie's Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, which for a few years enjoyed huge support.

However, it was not until after World War II that the Congress itself attempted to organise the masses. The transformation was largely brought about through the new ANC Youth League, whose Secretary was Oliver Tambo; other prominent leaders were Walter Sisulu, Albertina Sisulu, and Nelson Mandela. The League put in train a "Programme of Action" to radicalise the movement.

In 1948, the hardline National Party came to power. Although the main basis of apartheid already existed in the form of the division of land (laid down formally in the 1913 Land Tenure Act), the Pass System and the voting system, Africans had not all previously been totally disenfranchised and many forms of segregation were traditional rather than legally enforced. The National Party set about institutionalising discrimination on grounds of colour.

This galvanised the ANC into adopting the Youth League's Programme of Action at its annual conference in 1949. The Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign that followed (a campaign of mass protest, passive resistance and strikes) was led by the ANC and the South African Indian Congress. Over 8,000 volunteers were trained and subsequently went to jail. It was not this however, that brought the campaign to a halt, but rather the vicious use of the Public Order Act to ban all support for the campaign, direct and indirect.

Under its new president elected in 1952, Chief Albert Luthuli, the ANC formulated a fresh strategy to implement a "positive programme for freedom." Activists consulted with their communities to gather the people's demands in preparation for a National Convention of all the people regardless of their race, creed or colour.

The ANC, the SAIC, the Congress of Democrats, formed by the Whites in 1952, the SA Coloured People's Organisation and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, formed in 1955, all united to organise the Congress of the People, which took place in June, 1955 in Kliptown, near Johannesburg. Three thousand delegates met to adopt the Freedom Charter, which remains to this day the essential basis of the ANC's campaign.

A year later the regime retaliated by arresting 156 leaders of all races, who were charged with high treason. Their trial lasted for four years - and ended with the release of all the accused. Meanwhile, however, a group led by Robert Sobukwe had split from the ANC to form the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). They rejected cooperation with White activists.

The ANC had planned a National Anti-Pass Campaign to start in March, 1960, but it was at a PAC-organised anti-Pass demonstration in Sharpeville on March 21, that the police massacred 69 peacefully protesting Africans. Most of them were shot in the back, as they were running away. The ANC called a national strike and the mass burning of the Passes, but the regime panicked and announced a State of Emergency. Both the ANC and the PAC were declared illegal.

Up to that point the ANC had deliberately embraced a policy of peaceful resistance to the apartheid regime. One of the major philosophical influences on the ANC was provided by Mahatma Gandhi, who pioneered the use of passive resistance to achieve the goal of national liberation. Gandhi spent some years in South Africa, and was instrumental in forming the Natal Indian Congress in 1894. His ideas proved a powerful force and his son, Manilal, was prominent in the '50s Defiance Campaign. Although the State tried to pin charges of violence on the ANC, they could provide no proof.

Indeed, at the conclusion of the Treason Trial when all 156 accused were found not guilty, the Judge himself said that he accepted the "evidence that you (the ANC leaders) have consistently advised your followers to follow a peaceful course of action and to avoid violence in any shape or form."

This was internationally recognised when Chief Albert Luthuli became the first Black person to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1960.

However, with the increasing use of state terror to thwart the opponents of apartheid, and the banning of the movement, the ANC was compelled to reconsider its position. The National Party government had gradually closed off all the normal democratic avenues of protest, and nearly all forms of demonstration could be held to be illegal. Africans had no right to stand for parliament and no vote. In addition, the ANC leaders felt it would be wrong to continue to call for mass demonstrations, when they had no means of defending the people from indiscriminate slaughter by the police or the military.

After half a century of non-violent resistance, the ANC made the decision to form a military wing - "Umkhonto we Sizwe" (Spear of the Nation). MK, as it is now popularly known, declared itself on December 16, 1961 with the sabotage of various electric installations and government offices.

Nelson Mandela, its Commander, explained:

"The time comes in the life of any nation, when there remains only two choices - submit or fight. That time has now come in South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom."

Precisely the same decision was taken by the resistance in World War II, which concluded that Nazism had to be fought by all means available if it was to be defeated.

Umkhonto's initial campaign was one of sabotage, directed against government installations and key strategic places. It was a low-key campaign, which scrupulously avoided striking at people, and indeed the only human casualties were two of the saboteurs themselves.

That humane tradition continues up to the present day, and it is significant that in 1980, the ANC, at a ceremony at the headquarters of the International Red Cross, declared its adherence to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Protocol of 1977 on the humanitarian conduct of war.

The apartheid regime itself has consistently refused to sign the Protocol.

But in July 1963, Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki and the other major leaders of Umkhonto were all arrested at Rivonia and charged with sabotage and recruiting others for training in order to overthrow the State. A vast international campaign was launched to save them from an almost certain death penalty. The campaign succeeded in that eight of them were sentenced, not to death but to life imprisonment and sent to Robben Island, while the ninth, Lionel Bernstein was found not guilty.

The years that followed were difficult ones, but the struggle continued nonetheless. In 1967, the Luthuli Combat detachment comprising ANC and ZAPU guerillas crossed the Zambezi into Rhodesia, where they fought the Smith regime at Wankie and Sipolilo.

Then in the '70s the situation in Southern Africa changed dramatically. Angola and Mozambique won their freedom from the Portuguese, and inspired the Youth of South Africa. A new awareness of the value of Black culture and traditions, a new emphasis on the dignity of the Black person, found its expression in the Black Consciousness Movement. Another generation took to the streets in open opposition to apartheid and especially in the rejection of teaching through Afrikaans, seen as a symbol of their oppressors. In June, 1976 Soweto erupted, followed by townships throughout the country. June 16, 1976 is now known internationally as Soweto Day or Day of the Youth of South Africa.

Nearly 2,000 died, murdered by the regime, while thousands more fled the country to escape detention and torture. Jail conditions were highlighted by the death of the charismatic Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko, battered to death by his prison warders. Black Consciousness organisations, some of which were beginning to engage in dialogue with the ANC, and Black newspapers, were closed down.

But new organisations soon sprang up to take their place, such as the Azanian People's Organisation, AZAPO. Debates raged over the future development of the whole Black Consciousness philosophy, which some saw as a stage, necessary but still only a stage, on the way to national liberation, while others viewed its radical exclusivity as desirable in itself. AZAPO has never received widespread support from workers.

Meanwhile, the inheritors of the proud ANC traditions, its non-racialism and the social aims of the Freedom Charter, were working to establish a new organisation. They were spurred on by the regime's plans to introduce a new Constitution (since brought into operation), which would set up separate Indian and Coloured chambers, in addition to the White Parliament.

In August, 1983, the United Democratic Front emerged. It is an umbrella organisation comprising over 600 organisations of all kinds - church bodies, community and civic organisations, youth groups, trade unions, women's organisations and sporting and cultural groups. Its initial campaign for a boycott of the elections of the tricameral Parliament was an astounding success: in some constituencies only 2 per cent of the voters went to the polls, registering a heartening rejection of racist structures.

The establishment of the tricameral Parliament also sparked off a new wave of fury among the African majority, who were excluded even from this limited voice in affairs. Once more the townships erupted, while from the ANC came the call to render apartheid unworkable and the country ungovernable. Neither ferocious repression nor cosmetic reforms have stemmed this tide of opposition.

The first half of the decade of the '80s has made clear the huge support which the ANC enjoys in South Africa. Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, the one still serving a life sentence and the other in exile, enjoy a greater prestige inside and outside their country than any other South African. The struggle is indeed being intensified at all levels.

As the Freedom Charter says, "The People Shall Govern!' But the day of victory will be hastened by continued international support for the ANC's campaign.

Freedom is Coming in South Africa!

Courtesy: Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement

"AFRICA AND FREEDOM"

CHIEF ALBERT LUTHULI'S NOBEL LECTURE, DECEMBER 11, 1961

In years gone by, some of the greatest men of our century have stood here to receive this Award, men whose names and deeds have enriched the pages of human history, men whom future generations will regard as having shaped the world of our time. No one could be left unmoved at being plucked from the village of Groutville, a name many of you have never heard before and which does not even feature on many maps - plucked from banishment in a rural backwater, lifted out of the narrow confines of South Africa's internal politics and placed here in the shadow of these great figures. It is a great honour to me to stand on this rostrum where many of the great men of our times have stood.

The Nobel Peace Award that has brought me here has for me a threefold significance. On the one hand it is a tribute to my humble contribution to efforts by democrats on both sides of the colour line to find a peaceful solution to the race problem. This contribution is not in any way unique. I did not initiate the struggle to extend the area of human freedom in South Africa. Other African patriots - devoted men - did so before me! I also, as a Christian and patriot, could not look on while systematic attempts were made, almost in every department of life, to debase the God-factor in Man or to set a limit beyond which the human being in his black form might not strive to serve his Creator to the best of his ability. To remain neutral in a situation where the laws of the land virtually criticised God for having created men of colour was the sort of thing I could not, as a Christian, tolerate.

On the other hand the Award is a democratic declaration of solidarity with those who fight to widen the area of liberty in my part of the world. As such, it is the sort of gesture which gives me and millions who think as I do, tremendous encouragement.

There are still people in the world today who regard South Africa's race problem as a simple clash between Black and White. Our government has carefully projected this image of the problem before the eyes of the world. This has had two effects. It has confused the real issues at stake in the race crisis. It has given some form of force to the government's contention that the race problem is a domestic matter for South Africa. This, in turn, has tended to narrow down the area over which our case could be better understood in the world.

Continent in Revolution against Oppression

From yet another angle, it is a welcome recognition of the role played by the African people during the last fifty years to establish, peacefully, a society in which merit and not race would fix the position of the individual in the life of the nation.

This Award could not be for me alone, nor for just South Africa, but for Africa as a whole. Africa presently is most deeply torn with strife and most bitterly stricken with racial conflict. How strange then it is that a man of Africa should be here to receive an Award given for service to the cause of peace and brotherhood between men! There has been little peace in Africa in our time. From the northernmost end of our continent, where war has raged for seven years, to the centre and to the south there are battles being fought out, some with arms, some without. In my own country, in the year 1960 for which this Award is given, there was a state of emergency for many months. At Sharpeville, a small village, in a single afternoon 69 people were shot dead and 180 wounded by small arms fire: and in parts like the Transkei, a state of emergency is still continuing. Ours is a continent in revolution against oppression. And peace and revolution make uneasy bedfellows. There can be no peace until the forces of oppression are overthrown.

Our continent has been carved up by the great powers: alien governments have been forced upon the African people by military conquest and by economic domination; strivings for nationhood and national dignity have been beaten down by force; traditional economics and ancient customs have been disrupted; and human skills and energy have been harnessed for the advantage of our conquerors. In these times there has been no peace: there could be no brotherhood between men.

But now, the revolutionary stirrings of our continent are setting the past aside. Our people everywhere from north to south of the continent are reclaiming their land, their right to participate in government, their dignity as men, their nationhood. Thus, in the turmoil of revolution, the basis for peace and brotherhood in Africa is being restored by the resurrection of national sovereignty and independence, of equality and the dignity of man. It should not be difficult for you here in Europe to appreciate this. Your continent passed through a longer series of revolutionary upheavals, in which your age of feudal backwardness gave way to the new age of industrialisation, true nationhood, democracy and rising living standards - the golden age for which men have striven for generations. Your age of revolution, stretching across all the years from the 18th century to our own, encompassed some of the bloodiest civil wars in all history. By comparison, the African revolution has swept across three-quarters of the continent in less than a decade: its final completion is within sight of our own generation. Again, by comparison with Europe, our African revolution - to our credit - is proving to be orderly, quick and comparatively bloodless.

This fact of the relative peacefulness of our African revolution is attested to by other observers of eminence. Professor C. W. de Kiewiet, President of the Rochester University, U.S.A., in a Hoernle Memorial Lecture for 1960, has this to say: "There has, it is true, been almost no serious violence in the achievement of political self-rule. In that sense there is no revolution in Africa - only reform..."

Professor D. V. Cowen, then Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in a Hoernle Memorial Lecture for 1961, throws light on the nature of our struggle in the following words: "They (the whites in South Africa) are, again, fortunate in the very high moral calibre of the non-white inhabitants of South Africa, who compare favourably with any on the whole continent." Let this never be forgotten by those who so eagerly point a finger of scorn at Africa.

Perhaps by your standards, our surge to revolutionary reforms is late. If it is so - if we are late in joining the modern age of social enlightenment, late in gaining self-rule, independence and democracy - it is because in the past the pace has not been set by us. Europe set the pattern for the 19th and 20th century development of Africa. Only now is our continent coming into its own and recapturing its own fate from foreign rule.

United Africa the Goal

Though I speak of Africa as a single entity, it is divided in many ways - by race, language, history and custom; by political, economic and ethnic frontiers. But in truth, despite these multiple divisions, Africa has a single common purpose and a single goal - the achievement of its own independence. All Africa, both lands which have won their political victories, but have still to overcome the legacy of economic backwardness, and lands like my own whose political battles have still to be waged to their conclusion - all Africa has this single aim; our goal is a united Africa in which the standards of life and liberty are constantly expanding; in which the ancient legacy of illiteracy and disease is swept aside, in which the dignity of man is rescued from beneath the heels of colonialism which have trampled it. This goal, pursued by millions of our people with revolutionary zeal, by means of books, representations, demonstrations, and in some places armed force provoked by the adamancy of white rule, carries the only real promise of peace in Africa. Whatever means have been used, the efforts have gone to end alien rule and race oppression.

Brotherhood of Man Banned

There is a paradox in the fact that Africa qualifies for such an Award in its age of turmoil and revolution. How great is the paradox and how much greater the honour that an Award in support of peace and the brotherhood of man should come to one who is a citizen of a country where the brotherhood of man is an illegal doctrine, outlawed, banned, censured, proscribed and prohibited; where to work, talk or campaign for the realisation in fact and deed of the brotherhood of man is hazardous, punished with banishment, or confinement without trial or imprisonment; where effective democratic channels to peaceful settlement of the race problem have never existed these 300 years; and where minority power rests on the most heavily armed and equipped military machine in Africa. This is South Africa.

Even here, where white rule seems determined not to change its mind for the better, the spirit of Africa's militant struggle for liberty, equality and independence asserts itself. I, together with thousands of my countrymen, have in the course of the struggle for these ideals, been harassed, and imprisoned, but we are not deterred in our quest for a new age in which we shall live in peace and in brotherhood.

Cult of Race Superiority and of White Supremacy

It is not necessary for me to speak at length about South Africa; its social system, its politics, its economics and its laws have forced themselves on the attention of the world. It is a museum piece in our time, a hangover from the dark past of mankind, a relic of an age which everywhere else is dead or dying. Here the cult of race superiority and of white supremacy is worshipped like a god. Few white people escape corruption and many of their children learn to believe that white men are unquestionably superior, efficient, clever, industrious and capable; that black men are, equally unquestionably, inferior, slothful, stupid, evil and clumsy. On the basis of the mythology that "the lowest amongst them is higher than the highest amongst us," it is claimed that white men build everything that is worthwhile in the country - its cities, its industries, its mines and its agriculture - and control these things, whilst black men are only temporary sojourners in these cities, fitted only for menial labour, and unfit to share political power. The Prime Minister of South Africa, Dr Verwoerd, then Minister of Bantu Affairs, when explaining his government's policy on African education had this to say: "There is no place for him (the African) in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour."

There is little new in this mythology. Every part of Africa which has been subject to white conquest has, at one time or another, and in one guise or another, suffered from it, even in its virulent form of the slavery that obtained in Africa up to the 19th century.

Mission of the Church

The mitigating feature in the gloom of those far-off days was the shaft of light sunk by Christian missions, a shaft of light to which we owe our initial enlightenment. With successive governments of the time doing little or nothing to ameliorate the harrowing suffering of the black man at the hands of slave-drivers, men like Dr Livingstone and Dr John Philip and other illustrious men of God stood for social justice in the face of overwhelming odds. It is worth noting that the names I have referred to are still anathema to some South Africans. Hence the ghost of slavery lingers on to this day in the form of forced labour that goes on in what are called farm prisons. But the tradition of Livingstone and Philip lives on, perpetuated by a few of their line. It is fair to say that even in present day conditions, Christian missions have been in the vanguard of initiating social services provided for us. Our progress in this field has been in spite of and not mainly because of the government. In this the Church in South Africa, though belatedly, seems to be awakening to a broader mission of the Church, in its ministry among us. It is beginning to take seriously the words of its Founder who said "I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly." This is a call to the Church in South Africa to help in the all-round development of MAN in the present, and not only in the hereafter. In this regard, the people of South Africa, especially those who claim to be Christians, would be well advised to take heed of the Conference decisions of the World Council of Churches held at Cottesloe, Johannesburg, in 1960, which gave a clear lead on the mission of the Church in our day. It left no room for doubt about the relevancy of the Christian message in the present issues that confront mankind. I note with gratitude this broader outlook of the World Council of Churches. It has great meaning and significance for us in Africa.

Reality of Conditions in South Africa

There is nothing new in South Africa's apartheid ideas, but South Africa is unique in this: the ideas not only survive in our modern age, but are stubbornly defended, extended and bolstered up by legislation at the time when in the major part of the world they are now largely historical and are either being shamefacedly hidden behind concealing formulations, or are being steadily scrapped.

These ideas survive in South Africa because those who sponsor them profit from them. They provide moral whitewash for the conditions which exist in the country: for the fact that the country is ruled exclusively by a white government elected by an exclusively white electorate which is a privileged minority; for the fact that 87 per cent of the land and all the best agricultural land within reach of town, market and railways is reserved for white ownership and occupation and now through the recent Group Areas legislation non-whites are losing more land to white greed; for the fact that all skilled and highly-paid jobs are for whites only; for the fact that all universities of any academic merit are an exclusive preserve of whites; for the fact that the education of every white child costs about £64 per annum whilst that of an African child costs about £9 per annum and that of an Indian child or Coloured child costs about £20 per annum; for the fact that white education is universal and compulsory up to the age of 16 whilst education for the non-white children is scarce and, inadequate; and for the fact that almost one million Africans a year are arrested and gaoled or fined for breaches of innumerable pass and permit laws which do not apply to whites.

I could carry on in this strain, and talk on every facet of South African life from the cradle to the grave. But these facts today are becoming known to all the world. A fierce spotlight of world attention has been thrown on them. Try as our government and its apologists will, with honeyed words about "separate development" and eventual "independence" in so-called "Bantu homelands," nothing can conceal the reality of South African conditions.

I, as a Christian, have always felt that there is one thing above all about "apartheid" or "separate development" that is unforgivable. It seems utterly indifferent to the suffering of individual persons, who lose their land, their homes, their jobs, in the pursuit of what is surely the most terrible dream in the world. This terrible dream is not held on to by a crackpot group on the fringe of society, or by Ku Klux Klansmen, of whom we have a sprinkling. It is the deliberate policy of a government, supported actively by a large part of the white population, and tolerated passively by an overwhelming white majority but now fortunately rejected by an encouraging white minority who have thrown their lot with the non-whites who are overwhelmingly opposed to so-called separate development.

Thus it is that the golden age of Africa's independence is also the dark age of South Africa's decline and retrogression, brought about by men who, when revolutionary changes that entrenched fundamental human rights were taking place in Europe, were closed in on the tip of South Africa - and so missed the wind of progressive change.

In the wake of that decline and retrogression, bitterness between men grows to alarming heights: the economy declines as confidence ebbs away: unemployment rises; government becomes increasingly dictatorial and intolerant of constitutional and legal procedures, increasingly violent and suppressive; there is a constant drive for more policemen, more soldiers, more armaments, banishments without trial and penal whippings. All the trappings of medieval backwardness and cruelty come to the fore. Education is reduced to an instrument of subtle indoctrination, slanted and biased reporting in the organs of public information, a creeping censorship, book-banning and blacklisting - all these spread their shadows over the land. This is South Africa today, in the age of Africa's greatness.

Long Tradition of Struggle

But beneath the surface there is a spirit of defiance. The people of South Africa have never been a docile lot, least of all the African people. We have a long tradition of struggle for our national rights, reaching back to the very beginnings of white settlement and conquest 300 years ago.

Our history is one of opposition to domination, of protest and refusal to submit to tyranny. Consider some of our great names: the great warrior and nation-builder Chaka, who welded tribes into the Zulu nation from which I spring; Moshoeshoe, the statesman and nation-builder who fathered the Basuto nation and placed Basutoland beyond the reach of the claws of the South African whites; Hintsa of the Xhosas who chose death rather than surrender his territory to white invaders. All these and other royal names, as well as other great chieftains, resisted manfully white intrusion.

Consider also the sturdiness of the stock that nurtured the foregoing great names. I refer to our forbears, who in the trekking from the north to the southernmost tip of Africa centuries ago braved rivers that are perennially swollen, hacked their way through treacherous jungle and forest; survived the plagues of the then untamed lethal diseases of a multifarious nature that abounded in Equatorial Africa and wrested themselves from the gaping mouths of the beasts of prey. They endured it all. They settled in these parts of Africa to build a future worthwhile for us their offspring.

Whilst the social and political conditions have changed and the problems we face are different, we too, their progeny, find ourselves facing a situation where we have to struggle for our very survival as human beings. Although methods of struggle may differ from time to time, the universal human strivings for liberty remain unchanged. We in our situation have chosen the path of non-violence of our own volition. Along this path we have organised many heroic campaigns. All the strength of progressive leadership in South Africa, all my life and strength, has been given to the pursuance of this method, in an attempt to avert disaster in the interests of South Africa and (they) have bravely paid the penalties for it.

Unconquerable Spirit of Mankind

It may well be that South Africa's social system is a monument to racialism and race oppression, but its people are living testimony to the unconquerable spirit of mankind. Down the years, against seemingly overwhelming odds, they have sought the goal of fuller life and liberty striving with incredible determination and fortitude for the right to live as men - free men.

In this, our country is not unique. Your recent and inspiring history when the Axis Powers over-ran most European states, is testimony of this unconquerable spirit of mankind. People of Europe formed Resistance Movements that finally helped to break the power of the combination of Nazism and fascism with their creed of race arrogance and herrenvolk mentality.

Every people have, at one time or another in their history been plunged into such struggle. But generally the passing of time has seen the barriers to freedom going down, one by one. Not so in South Africa. Here the barriers do not go down. Each step we take forward, every achievement we chalk up, is cancelled out by the raising of new and higher barriers to our advance. The colour bars do not get weaker; they get stronger. The bitterness of the struggle mounts as liberty comes step by step closer to the freedom fighter's grasp. All too often, the protests and demonstrations of our people have been beaten back by force; but they have never been silenced.

Through all this cruel treatment in the name of law and order, our people, with a few exceptions, have remained non-violent. If today this peace Award is given to South Africa through a black man, it is not because we in South Africa have won our fight for peace and human brotherhood. Far from it. Perhaps we stand farther from victory than any other people in Africa. But nothing which we have suffered at the hands of the government has turned us from our chosen path of disciplined resistance. It is for this, I believe, that this Award is given.

Vision of Non-racial Democratic South Africa

How easy it would have been in South Africa for the natural feelings of resentment at white domination to have been turned into feelings of hatred and a desire for revenge against the white community. Here, where every day in every aspect of life, every non-white comes up against the ubiquitous sign, "Europeans Only", and the equally ubiquitous policeman to enforce it - here it could well be expected that a racialism equal to that of their oppressors would flourish to counter the white arrogance towards blacks. That it has not done so is no accident. It is because, deliberately and advisedly, African leadership for the past 50 years, with the inspiration of the African National Congress which I had the honour to lead for the last decade or so until it was banned, had set itself steadfastly against racial vain-gloriousness.

We knew that in so doing we passed up opportunities for easy demagogic appeal to the natural passions of a people denied freedom and liberty; we discarded the chance of an easy and expedient emotional appeal. Our vision has always been that of a non-racial democratic South Africa which upholds the rights of all who live in our country, to remain there as full citizens with equal rights and responsibilities with all others. For the consummation of this ideal we hove laboured unflinchingly. We shall continue to labour unflinchingly.

It is this vision which prompted the African National Congress to invite members of other racial groups who believe with us in the brotherhood of man and in the freedom of all people to join with us in establishing a non-racial democratic South Africa. Thus the African National Congress in its day brought about the Congress Alliance and welcomed the emergence of the Liberal Party and the Progressive Party who, to an encouraging measure, support these ideals.

This is What We Stand For

The true patriots of South Africa, for whom I speak, will be satisfied with nothing less than the fullest democratic rights. In government we will not be satisfied with anything less than direct individual adult suffrage and the right to stand for and be elected to all organs of government. In economic matters we will be satisfied with nothing less than equality of opportunity in every sphere, and the enjoyment by all of those heritages which form the resources of the country which up to now have been appropriated on a racial "whites only" basis. In culture we will be satisfied with nothing less than the opening of all doors of learning to non-segregatory institutions on the sole criterion of ability. In the social sphere we will be satisfied with nothing less than the abolition of all racial bars.

We do not demand these things for peoples of African descent alone. We demand them for all South Africans, white and black. On these principles we are uncompromising. To compromise would be an expediency that is most treacherous to democracy, for in the turn of events the sweets of economic, political and social privileges that are a monopoly of only one section of a community turn sour even in the mouths of those who eat them. Thus apartheid in practice is proving to be a monster created by Frankenstein. That is the tragedy of the South African scene.

Many spurious slogans have been invented in our country in an effort to redeem uneasy race relations - "trusteeship," "separate development," "race federation" and elsewhere "partnership." These are efforts to side-track us from the democratic road, mean delaying tactics that fool no one but the unwary. No euphemistic naming will ever hide their hideous nature. We reject these policies because they do great offence to man's sublime aspirations that have remained true in a sea of flux and change down the ages, aspirations of which the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is a culmination. This is what we stand for. This is what we fight for.

Support Throughout the World

In their fight for lasting values, there are many things that have sustained the spirit of the freedom-loving people of South Africa and those in the yet unredeemed parts of Africa where the whiteman claims resolutely propriety rights over democracy - a universal heritage. High amongst them - the things that have sustained us - stand the magnificent support of the progressive people and governments throughout the world, amongst whom number the people and government of the country of which I am today guest; our brothers in Africa, especially in the independent African States; organisations who share the outlook we embrace in countries scattered right across the face of the globe; the United Nations Organisation jointly and some of its member nations singly. In their defence of peace in the world through actively upholding the equality of man all these groups have reinforced our undying faith in the unassailable rightness and justness of our cause.

To all of them I say: Alone we would have been weak. Our heartfelt appreciation of your acts of support of us, we cannot adequately express, nor can we ever forget, now or in the future when victory is behind us, and South Africa's freedom rests in the hands of all her people.

Courage that Rises with Danger

We South Africans, however, equally understand that much as others might do for us, our freedom cannot come to us as a gift from abroad. Our freedom we must make ourselves. All honest freedom-loving people have dedicated themselves to that task. What we need is the courage that rises with danger.

Whatever may be the future of our freedom efforts, our cause is the cause of the liberation of people who are denied freedom. Only on this basis can the peace of Africa and the world be firmly founded. Our cause is the cause of equality between nations and people. Only thus can the brotherhood of man be firmly established. It is encouraging and elating to remind you that despite her humiliation and torment at the hands of white rule, the spirit of Africa in quest of freedom has been, generally, for peaceful means to the utmost.

If I have dwelt at length on my country's race problem it is not as though other countries of our continent do not labour under these problems, but because it is here in the Republic of South Africa that the race problem is most acute. Perhaps in no other country on the continent is white supremacy asserted with greater vigour and determination and a sense of righteousness. This places the opponents of apartheid in the front rank of those who fight white domination.

Africa's Challenges and Opportunities

In bringing my address to a close, let me invite Africa to cast her eyes beyond the past and to some extent the present with their woes and tribulations, trials and failures, and some successes, and see herself an emerging continent, bursting to freedom through the shell of centuries of serfdom. This is Africa's age, the dawn of her fulfilment, yes, the moment when she must grapple with destiny to reach the summits of sublimity saying: ours was a fight for noble values and worthy ends, and not for lands and the enslavement of man.

Africa is a vital subject matter in the world of today, a focal point of world interest and concern. Could it not be that history has delayed her rebirth for a purpose? The situation confronts her with inescapable challenges, but more importantly with opportunities for service to herself and mankind. She evades the challenges and neglects the opportunities to her shame, if not her doom. How she sees her destiny is a more vital and rewarding quest than bemoaning her past with its humiliations and sufferings.

The address could do no more than pose some questions and leave it to the African leaders and peoples to provide satisfying answers and responses by their concern for higher values and by their noble actions that could be

... footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing, o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again."

Still licking the scars of past wrongs perpetrated on her, could she not be magnanimous and practise no revenge? Her hand of friendship scornfully rejected, her pleas for justice and fair-play spurned, should she not nonetheless seek to turn enmity into amity? Though robbed of her lands, her independence and opportunities - this, oddly enough, often in the name of civilisation and even Christianity - should she not see her destiny as being that of making a distinctive contribution to human progress and human relationships with a peculiar new African flavour enriched by the diversity of cultures she enjoys, thus building on the summits of present human achievement an edifice that would be one of the finest tributes to the genius of man? She should see this hour of her fulfilment as a challenge to labour on until she is purged of racial domination, and as an opportunity of reassuring the world that her national aspiration lies, not in overthrowing white domination to replace it by a black caste, but in building a non-racial democracy that shall be a monumental brotherhood, a "brotherly community" with none discriminated against on grounds of race or colour.

What of the many pressing and complex political, economic and cultural problems attendant upon the early years of a newly-independent State? These, and others which are the legacy of colonial days, will tax to the limit the statesmanship, ingenuity, altruism and steadfastness of African leadership and its unbending avowal to democratic tenets in statecraft. To us all, free or not free, the call of the hour is to redeem the name and honour of Mother Africa.

In a strife-torn world, tottering on the brink of complete destruction by man-made nuclear weapons, a free and independent Africa is in the making, in answer to the injunction and challenge of history: "Arise and shine for thy light is come." Acting in concert with other nations, she is man's last hope for a mediator between the East and West, and is qualified to demand of the great powers to "turn the swords into plough-shares" because two-thirds of mankind is hungry and illiterate; to engage human energy, human skill and human talent in the service of peace, for the alternative is unthinkable - war, destruction and desolation; and to build a world community which will stand as a lasting monument to the millions of men and women, to such devoted and distinguished world citizens and fighters for peace as the late Dag Hammarskjold, who have given their lives that we may live in happiness and peace.

Africa's qualification for this noble task is incontestable, for her own fight has never been and is not now a fight for conquest of land, for accumulation of wealth or domination of peoples, but for the recognition and preservation of the rights of man and the establishment of a truly free world for a free people.

OLIVER TAMBO ON NELSON MANDELA

[Introduction by Oliver Tambo to No Easy Walk to Freedom: Articles, Speeches and Trial Addresses by Nelson Mandela, edited by Ruth First and published by Heinemann, London, 1965.]

MANDELA AND TAMBO said the brass plate on our office door. We practised as attorneys-at-law in Johannesburg in a shabby building across the street from the Magistrates' Court. Chancellor House in Fox Street was one of the few buildings in which African tenants could hire offices: it was owned by Indians. This was before the axe of the Group Areas Act fell to declare the area "white" and landlords were themselves prosecuted if they did not evict the Africans. MANDELA AND TAMBO was written huge across the frosted window panes on the second floor, and the letters stood out like a challenge. To white South Africa it was bad enough that two men with black skins should practise as lawyers, but it was indescribably worse that the letters also spelled out our political partnership.

Nelson and I were both born in the Transkei, he one year after me. We were students together at Fort Hare University College. With others we had founded the African National Congress Youth League. We went together into the Defiance Campaign of 1952, into general strikes against the Government and sat in the same Treason Trial dock.

For years we worked side by side in the offices near the Courts. To reach our desks each morning, Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient queues of people overflowing from the chairs in the waiting-room into the corridors. South Africa has the dubious reputation of boasting one of the highest prison populations in the world. Jails are jam-packed with Africans imprisoned for serious offences - and crimes of violence are ever on the increase in apartheid society - but also for petty infringements of statutory law that no really civilised society would punish with imprisonment. To be unemployed is a crime because no African can for long evade arrest if his passbook does not carry the stamp of authorised and approved employment. To be landless can be a crime, and we interviewed weekly the delegations of grizzled, weather-worn peasants from the countryside, who came to tell us how many generations of their families had worked a little piece of land from which they were now being ejected. To brew African beer, to drink it or to use the proceeds to supplement the meagre family income is a crime, and women who do so face heavy fines and jail terms. To cheek a white man can be a crime. To live in the "wrong" area - an area declared white or Indian or Coloured - can be a crime for Africans. South African apartheid laws turn innumerable innocent people into "criminals." Apartheid stirs hatred and frustration among people. Young people, who should be in school or learning a trade, roam the streets, join gangs and wreak their revenge on the society that confronts them with only the dead-end alley of crime or poverty.

Our buff office files carried thousands of these stories and if, when we started our law partnership, we had not been rebels against South African apartheid, our experiences in our offices would have remedied the deficiency. We had risen to professional status in our community, but every case in court, every visit to the prisons to interview clients, reminded us of the humiliation and suffering burning into our people.

Nelson, one of the royal family of the Transkei, was groomed from childhood for respectability, status and sheltered living. Born near Umtata in 1918, he was the eldest son of a Tembo chief. His father died when he was twelve and his upbringing and education were taken over by the Paramount Chief. Nelson, Sabata, Paramount Chief of the Tembu and opponent of the Government, and Kaizer Matanzima, Chief Minister of the Transkei and arch-collaborator with the Nationalist Government, were educated together. At the age of l6, Nelson went to Fort Hare and there we first met: in the thick of a student strike.

After Fort Hare, we parted company. I went on to teach mathematics at St. Peter's School in Johannesburg. From this school, killed by the Government in later years because it refused to bow its head to government-dictated principles of a special education for "inferior" Africans (Bantu Education), graduated successive series of young men drawn inexorably into the African National Congress, because it was the head of our patriotic, national movement for our rights.

Nelson ran away from the Transkei to escape a tribal marriage his cousins and uncles were trying to arrange for him. In Johannesburg, he had his first encounter with the lot of the urban African in a teeming African township: overcrowding, incessant raids for passes, arrests, poverty, the pinpricks and frustrations of the white rule. Walter Sisulu, Secretary-General of the African National Congress in a vital period, befriended and advised and urged him to study law. Mandela studied by correspondence to gain an arts degree, enrolled for a law degree at the University of the Witwatersrand and was later articled to a firm of white attorneys. We met again in 1944 in the ranks of the African National Congress Youth League.

As a man, Nelson is passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage. He has a natural air of authority. He cannot help magnetising a crowd: he is commanding with a tall, handsome bearing; trusts and is trusted by the youth, for their impatience reflects his own; appealing to the women. He is dedicated and fearless. He is the born mass leader.

But early on, he came to understand that State repression was too savage to permit mass meetings and demonstrations through which the people could ventilate their grievances and hope for redress. It was of limited usefulness to head great rallies. The Government did not listen and soon enough the tear gas and the muzzles of the guns were turned against the people. The justice of our cries went unrecognised. The popularity of leaders like Mandela was an invitation to counter-attack by the Government. Mandela was banned from speaking, from attending gatherings, from leaving Johannesburg, from belonging to any organisation. Speeches, demonstrations, peaceful protests, political organising became illegal.

Of all that group of young men, Mandela and his close friend and co-leader, Walter Sisulu, were perhaps the fastest to get to grips with the harsh realities of the African struggle against the most powerful adversary in Africa: a highly industrialised, well-armed State, manned by a fanatical group of white men determined to defend their privilege and their prejudice, and aided by the complicity of American, British, West German, and Japanese investment in the most profitable system of oppression on the continent. Nelson was a key figure in thinking, planning and devising new tactics.

We had to forge an alliance of strength based not on colour but on commitment to the total abolition of apartheid and oppression; we would seek allies, of whatever colour, as long as they were totally agreed on our liberation aims. The African people, by nature of their numbers, their militancy, and the grimness of their oppression, would be the spearhead of the struggle. We had to organise the people, in town and countryside, as an instrument for struggle. Mandela drafted the "M" plan, a simple commonsense plan for organisation on a street basis, so that Congress volunteers would be in daily touch with the people, alert to their needs and able to mobilise them. He no longer appeared on the public platform and few platforms were allowed us as the years went by, but he was ever among the people, guiding his lieutenants to organise them. During the Treason Trial these efforts at organisation were put on trial. Mandela went from prison cell to dock and then to witness-box, when the accused conducted their defence and he and his co-accused expounded the policy of Congress in court. The men in the dock were acquitted, but the trial marked the end of that epoch and the opening of a new one.

By 1960, virtually every African leader was muzzled and restricted by Government decree. There was no right to organise. In March, 1960, there were the anti-pass protests called by the breakaway Pan Africanist Congress, and the peaceful gathering at Sharpeville was machine-gunned. The ANC called for a national protest strike.

The country answered that call. The ANC was declared illegal, together with the Pan Africanist Congress. In a five-month-long state of emergency, virtually every known Congressman was imprisoned, but during the Emergency and even more so immediately afterwards the ANC put itself on an underground footing. Now Mandela's "M" plan came into its own. Ever at the centre, pulling the strings together, inspiring the activities that, if apprehended, could mean long stretches in prison for ANC activists, was Nelson.

In May, 1961, South Africa was to be declared a Nationalist Republic. There was a white referendum, but no African was consulted. The African people decided there were ways of making their opposition felt. A general strike would be the answer. The strike was called in the name of Nelson Mandela. He left his home, our office, his wife and children, to live the life of a political outlaw. Here began the legend of the "Black Pimpernel." He lived in hiding, meeting only his closest political associates, travelling round the country in disguise, popping up here to lead and advise, disappearing again when the hunt got too hot.

The strike was smashed by an unprecedented police and army mobilisation. If peaceful protests like these were to be put down by force then the people would be forced to use other methods of struggle; this was the inevitable conclusion. The ANC was no longer merely a national patriotic front, it was an underground resistance struggle. Acts of sabotage shook the country from the second half of 1961. "Umkhonto we Sizwe" (the Spear of the Nation) had been formed and was at work.

I had left South Africa early in 1960, sent out by the ANC to open our office abroad. Mandela was then in prison during the state of emergency proclaimed after Sharpeville. I saw him again, astonishingly, in 1961 and 1962, when he left his hiding places somewhere in South Africa, was smuggled across the border and turned up at the Addis Ababa conference of the Pan African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa¹ to expound before the delegates the policy for the struggle of our organisation and our people.

In South Africa, the freedom fight has grown grim and relentless. Mandela went home to survive a perilous existence underground for 17 months until he was betrayed by an informer and sentenced to five years' imprisonment for his leadership of the 1961 strike and for leaving the country illegally. From his cell, he was taken to the dock in the Rivonia Trial to face trial with eight others - among them Walter Sisulu. The charge was sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the Government by force. The world watched that trial and knows the verdict of guilty and the sentence of life imprisonment.

Nelson Mandela is in Robben Island today. His inspiration lives on in the heart of every African patriot. He is the symbol of the self-sacrificing leadership our struggle has thrown up and our people need. He is unrelenting, yet capable of flexibility and delicate judgment. He is an outstanding individual, but he knows that he derives his strength from the great masses of people, who make up the freedom struggle in our country.

I am convinced that the worldwide protests during the Rivonia Trial saved Mandela and his fellow-accused from the death sentence. But in South Africa, a life sentence means imprisonment until death - or until the defeat of the Government, which holds these men prisoners. The sentences they serve are a scaring reminder that such men must not be wasted behind bars; that no solution to South Africa's conflict can be found, while the people are deprived of such leadership; that Mandela is imprisoned not for his personal defiance of apartheid law but because he asserted the claims of a whole people living and dying under the most brutal system of race rule the world knows.

[A Postscript: Nelson Mandela on Oliver Tambo: "Oliver Tambo is much more than a brother to me. He is my greatest friend and comrade for nearly 50 years." (Nelson Mandela in a message from prison, February 1985).]

NELSON MANDELA AND THE JAWAHARLAL NEHRU AWARD

OLIVER TAMBO'S SPEECH ACCEPTING THE AWARD ON BEHALF OF MANDELA, NEW DELHI, NOVEMBER 14, 1980

Today, as Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela moves around the restricted confines of his prison cell on Robben Island, his mind is tuned in to the proceedings in Delhi. He shares this preoccupation not only with his beloved wife, Winnie Mandela, herself the subject of heartless restrictions and bans, but also with Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, James April, Toivo ja Toivo and other national leaders and fighters for liberation, for democracy and justice - fellow inmates of the notorious Robben Island prison. The thoughts of the entire membership of the ANC and of its allies and friends converge today on Delhi. The vast majority of the people of South Africa, from all walks of life and all strata and race origins - the young, no less than the old, regard this day in New Delhi as a national occasion for them.

It is, therefore, my pleasant duty, on behalf of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress, to express the deep appreciation and gratitude of all the national leaders and patriots incarcerated in the prisons of apartheid, all the members, allies and friends of the ANC and the great masses of the people engaged in the liberation struggle of our country, for the great honour bestowed on Nelson Mandela in nominating him for the 1979 Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding.

It is equally and especially my pleasant duty, although a much more onerous one, to convey to Your Excellency, Mr. President, to the Prime Minister and to your Government and people, the heartfelt thanks of our colleague, brother and comrade, Nelson Mandela.

He received the news of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award with a mixture of disbelief, surprise, profound gratitude and excitement. But the excitement quickly mellowed into a deep sense of humility. For, he understands the full meaning of the Award, its enormous significance and its challenging implications for him and his people.

He understands, because he knows Pandit Nehru's imposing stature as a world statesman; he knows his revered place in the hearts, minds and lives of the 650 million people of India; he knows, too, the esteem and deep respect Pandit Nehru enjoyed among the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Nelson Mandela, therefore, accepts the Award with full awareness of its historic message. He accepts it as a supreme challenge to him personally and to the leadership of the ANC and the people of South Africa of all races. He accepts it as an honour less for him than for the people of Africa.

We, of the African National Congress, wish to pay special tribute to the penetrating vision of the jury of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding. The recipient, Nelson Mandela, is beyond the reach of society. For more than 18 years, he has travelled and appeared nowhere, his voice has remained unheard and his views unexpressed. In that time, momentous world events have occurred sufficient to put into complete oblivion any one not involved in the main current of developments. We mention a few of these developments, limiting ourselves to Africa only.

A long-cherished dream of the ANC came true with the formation of the OAU in 1963. The continent has torn asunder almost every chain of colonial bondage and joined the world community of nations as a full and equal member, contributing with great effect to the solution of international problems. Southern Africa has undergone geopolitical transformations and social upheavals in the course of which colonial foundations, some of them laid 500 years ago, have been reduced to a heap of ruins. New names have appeared on the international scene and now stand out as great landmarks defining the geopolitical landscape of southern Africa: Samora Machel, Kenneth Kaunda, Agostinho Neto, Seretse Khama, Julius Nyerere, Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe and Sam Nujoma. The South African Defence Force, mighty in its arms and proud of its record, has had the traumatic experience of being defeated for the first time in its history by the armed forces of a newly independent State, and barely three months later, the same army was unleashing its might upon small children who confronted its bullets with only dustbin-lids and stones in Soweto. South Africa has suffered the staggering "Information Scandal," which climaxed in the fall of Vorster and Van den Bergh, of whom it could be said: No two South Africans have been more faithful to Hitler and his ways and none more identified with the naked inhumanity of the apartheid system.

Their place has been taken by P. W. Botha and Piet Koornhof, who, fighting no less relentlessly for the permanence of white minority rule in South Africa, have given fresh impetus to the dynamics of revolutionary change by their remarkable and disastrous failure to distinguish between the forgotten era of J. C. Smuts and Jan Hofmeyr - when the African giant was still lying prostrate, in chains - and the present hour, when the people's demand for power enjoys universal support and can no longer be compromised.

For, the question in South Africa today is no longer what amendments should be made to the law, but who makes the law and the amendments. Is it the people of South Africa as a whole or a white minority group with not even a democratic mandate from the majority of the people? An organ like the so-called Presidential Council is wholly objectionable not because Africans are excluded from it, but because it is a studied insult to the black people. It represents a policy decision for, and not by, the majority of South Africans. If this is the practice today, it was the practice in 1910 and since. But today, the people of South Africa are challenging the very constitutional foundations of the Republic of South Africa. Hence, the struggle for the seizure of power.

The stormy succession of tumultuous events of the kind we have mentioned were sufficient to drive Nelson Mandela and his Robben Island colleagues out of our minds. Yet, he and the other jailed national leaders have a presence in the consciousness of our people and of the world public so powerful that it cannot be explained except in terms of the indestructibility of the cause to which they have surrendered their liberty and offered their lives - the cause of the oppressed majority in South Africa, the cause of Africa, the cause of progressive mankind.

The unique significance of the 1979 Jawaharlal Nehru Award is that, displaying a delicate sensitivity to this enduring presence, it has identified in Nelson Mandela the indomitable spirit of a people, the supreme justice of their cause and their resolute determination to win final victory. In our humble opinion, the jury of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding could have made no better choice among the people of South Africa for such an honour at this time. For, if the immediate reaction of racist Prime Minister P.W. Botha to the victory of the Patriotic Front Alliance in Zimbabwe was to invite the people of South Africa to a multiracial conference to discuss the future of that country, the oppressed millions, supported by white democrats, responded by demanding the release of Nelson Mandela from imprisonment. The fact that P.W. Botha was evidently only trying to diffuse an explosive situation in South Africa subtracts nothing from the centrality of Nelson Mandela's past, present and future role in the struggle to unite the people of South Africa as fellow citizens in a democratic, nonracial and peaceful country. His entire political life has been guided by the vision of a democratic South Africa, its people united across the barriers of race, colour and religion, and contributing as a single nation to the pursuit of international peace and progress. For this reason, he knows no distinction between the struggle and his life.

Having chosen the law, as the avenue through which he could best serve his people, he soon found that the legal system of apartheid was itself an instrument of oppression. His conscience dictated that he place the quest for justice above the administration of unjust laws. This concern for justice led him into politics, into the leadership of the African National Congress, and ultimately to Robben Island - and even more politics.

It is opportune to recall, and Nelson Mandela's captors may wish to ponder the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru, who was no stranger to imprisonment and was in no way destroyed by it, served the world community, including the British, far better as a free man than as a political prisoner. Nelson Mandela's 18 years' imprisonment has in no way destroyed him, and will not. Indeed a striking feature of political imprisonment in South Africa is that the morale of the prisoners remains intact notwithstanding the harsh brutality of the prison conditions and the long duration of the prison sentences.

The demand for the release of Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners is worldwide and is made more in the interests of all South Africans than out of any sense of unwanted pity for those imprisoned. But, overwhelmed by their iniquitous past and present, and lacking in true courage, the self-appointed rulers of our country fear the future: they are frightened of democracy, scared of social progress and suspicious of peace. That is why Nelson Mandela and some of the best known of our leaders remain in prison.

That is why it seems inevitable that the road to our liberation will be vastly different from yours, Mr. President. When India celebrated 25 years of independence, you observed, in your publication, India 1973, that "twenty-five years ago... the British transferred power to the rightful rulers of the country, the people of India. The event was unique for at least one reason: the transfer of power was effected not as a consequence of a clash of arms, but as the culmination of a nonviolent revolution led by Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest apostle of peace and non-violence in modern times."

The revolution in South Africa has already lost its non-violent character. Twenty-five years ago this year, in the course of a powerful non-violent struggle led by one of the greatest leaders in South African history, Chief A.J. Luthuli, late President-General of the ANC and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1960, the people of South Africa adopted the Freedom Charter - a blueprint for democracy, progress and peace, which has itself gained international recognition as the key to a happy and peaceful future for South Africa.

But a mere six years after the adoption of the Freedom Charter, the oppressed people of South Africa were compelled to choose between violence and cowardice, to decide whether to fight or to surrender. They rejected cowardice. They refused to surrender. They took up arms. Africa and the world community approved and endorsed their decision.

Unlike India, therefore, South Africa holds out no conceivable prospect for a peaceful transfer of power to the people of South Africa. And yet, there is a golden thread that has linked the people of India and South Africa over the centuries.

Jan van Riebeeck, of the Dutch East India Company, was on a voyage to the seaports of India and the Far East when, in 1652, he stopped in South Africa and there planted a problem, which the United Nations has been debating since its foundation and which the United Nations General Assembly is discussing this very week.

It is fitting that on this day, I should recall the long and glorious struggle of those South Africans who came to our shores from India 120 years ago. Within two years of entering the bondage of indentured labour, Indian workers staged their first strike against the working conditions in Natal. This was probably the first general strike in South African history. Their descendants, working and fighting for the future of their country, South Africa, have retained the tradition of militant struggle and are today an integral part of the mass-based liberation movement in South Africa.

But the striking role of India in the development of the struggle for national and social liberation in South Africa has its firm roots in the early campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi in that country, coupled with the continuing and active interest he took in the South African situation. All South Africans have particular cause to honour and remember the man, who was in our midst for 21 years and went on to enter the history books as the Father of Free India. His imprint on the course of the South African struggle is indelible.

In the 1940s, in South Africa and India, our people voiced the same sentiments; to wage a war in the name of freedom and democracy, they said, was a hollow mockery as long as the colonial peoples were not free. We applauded the "Quit India" demand against the British, for, as the Congress resolution in August, 1942, so correctly said: "India... the classic land of modern imperialism, has become the crux of the question, for by the freedom of India will Britain and the United Nations be judged, and the peoples of Asia and Africa be filled with hope and enthusiasm." And so we were filled with hope and enthusiasm as we watched events unfold in India.

If Mahatma Gandhi started and fought his heroic struggle in South Africa and India, Jawaharlal Nehru was to continue it in Asia, Africa and internationally. In 1946, India broke trade relations with South Africa - the first country to do so. In the same year, at the First Session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Indian Government sharply raised the question of racial discrimination in South Africa - again the first country to take this action.

Speaking at the Bandung Conference in April 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru declared: "There is nothing more terrible than the infinite tragedy of Africa in the past few hundred years."

Referring to "the days when millions of Africans were carried away as galley slaves to America and elsewhere, half of them dying in the galleys," he urged: "we must accept responsibility for it, all of us, even though we ourselves were not directly involved."

He continued: "But unfortunately, in a different sense, even now the tragedy of Africa is greater than that of any other continent, whether it is racial or political. It is up to Asia to help Africa to the best of her ability because we are sister continents."

To her great honour, India has consistently lived up to this historic declaration, which constitutes one of the cornerstones of the Non-Aligned Movement. The tragedy of Africa, in racial and political terms, is now concentrated in the southern tip of the continent - in South Africa, Namibia, and in a special sense, Robben Island.

Quite clearly we have all come a long way from 1955. Jawaharlal Nehru's clarion call has already translated itself into a lasting partnership of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, who have joined hands with the Socialist community of nations, the progressive forces of the world and the national liberation movement, in an anti-imperialist front to eradicate the last vestiges of colonial domination and racism in Africa and elsewhere, to end fascism and exploitation, and to promote a new world economic order that will ensure true democracy, social progress and peace.

Nelson Mandela, who gained political maturity in the company of such household names in South Africa as A.J. Luthuli, Moses Kotane, Yusuf Dadoo, J.B. Marks, Elias Moretsele, Z.K. Matthews, Monty Naicker, Walter Sisulu, Lillian Ngoyi, Bram Fischer, Govan Mbeki, Helen Joseph and many others, has been confirmed by the Jawaharlal Nehru Award as a leader of men, ranking among the great international leaders of modern times. In their struggle for the seizure of power, the people of South Africa - its youth, workers, women, intelligentsia and peasants, led by the African National Congress and its allies, will not betray this great honour to our country. Nelson Mandela, with the rest of the leadership of the ANC, will remain worthy of the great Jawaharlal Nehru, today, tomorrow, ever.

The struggle to rid South Africa of racism, apartheid and colonial domination continues and victory for the world anti-imperialist forces is certain.

NELSON MANDELA'S LETTER FROM PRISON TO INDIA, 1980

[LETTER TO MRS. MANORAMA BHALLA, SECRETARY OF THE INDIAN COUNCIL FOR CULTURAL RELATIONS, NEW DELHI]

3 August 1980
Robben Island,
7400 Republic of South Africa
3 August 1980

Dear Mrs. Bhalla,

I am writing to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to the Indian Council for Cultural Relations for honouring me with the 1979 "Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding." Although I have been singled out for this award, I am mindful that I am the mere medium for an honour that rightly belongs to the people of our country.

Our people cannot but feel humble, at the same time proud that one of their number has been selected to join the distinguished men and women who have been similarly honoured in the past.

I recall these names because to my mind they symbolize not only the scope and nature of the award, but they in turn constitute a fitting tribute to the great man after whom it has been named - Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The lives and varied contribution of each one of them reflect in some measure the rich and many-sided life of Panditji: selfless humanitarian Mother Teresa, international statesman Josip Broz Tito, notable political leaders Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda, medical benefactor Jonas Salk and civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

Truly Jawaharlal Nehru was an outstanding man. A combination of many men into one: freedom fighter, politician, world statesman, prison graduate, master of the English language, lawyer and historian. As one of the pioneers of the Non-aligned movement he has made a lasting contribution to world peace and the brotherhood of man.

In the upsurge of anti-colonial and freedom struggles that swept through Asia and Africa in the post-war period there could hardly be a liberation movement or national leader who was not influenced in one way or another by the thoughts, activities and example of Pandit Nehru and the All-India Congress. If I may presume to look back on my own political education and upbringing, I find that my own ideas were influenced by his experience.

While at university and engrossed in student politics I for the first time became familiar with the name of this famous man. In the forties, I for the first time read one of his books, The Unity of India. It made an indelible impression on my mind and ever since then I procured, read and treasured any one of his works that became available.

When reading his Autobiography or Glimpses of World History, one is left with the overwhelming impact of the immense scope of his ideas and breadth of his vision. Even in prison he refused to succumb to a disproportionate concern with mundane matters or the material hardships of his environment. Instead he devoted himself to creative activity and produced writings which will remain a legacy to generations of freedom lovers.

"Walls are dangerous companions," he wrote, "they may occasionally protect from outside evil and keep out an unwelcome intruder. But they also make you a prisoner and a slave, and you purchase your so-called purity and immunity at the cost of freedom. And the most terrible of walls are the walls that grow up in the mind which prevent you from discarding an evil tradition simply because it is old, and from accepting a new thought because it is novel."

Like most young men in circumstances similar to ours, the politically inclined youth of my generation too were drawn together by feelings of an intense, but narrow form of nationalism. However with experience, coupled with the unfurling of events at home and abroad, we acquired new perspectives and, as the horizon broadened, we began to appreciate the inadequacy of some youthful ideas. Time was to teach us, as Panditji says, that:

"... Nationalism is good in its place, but is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian. It blinds us to many happenings and sometimes distorts the truth, especially when it concerns us and our country..."

In a world in which breathtaking advances in technology and communication have shortened the space between the erstwhile prohibitively distant lands; where outdated beliefs and imaginary differences among the people were being rapidly eradicated, where exclusiveness was giving way to cooperation and interdependence, we too found ourselves obliged to shed our narrow outlook and adjust to fresh realities.

Like the All-India Congress, one of the premier national liberation movements of the colonial world, we too began to assess our situation in a global context. We quickly learned the admonition of a great political thinker and teacher that no people in one part of the world could really be free while their brothers in other parts were still under foreign rule.

Our people admired the solidarity the All-India Congress displayed with the people of Ethiopia whose country was being ravaged by Fascist Italy. We observed that undeterred by labels, the All-India Congress courageously expressed its sympathy with republican Spain. We were inspired when we learned of the Congress Medical Mission to China in 1938. We noted that while the imperialist powers were hoping and even actively conniving to thrust the barbarous forces of Nazism against the Soviet Union, Panditji publicly spurned a pressing invitation to visit Mussolini, and two years later he again refused an invitation to Nazi Germany. Instead he chose to go to Czechoslovakia, a country betrayed and dismembered by the infamous Munich deal.

In noting the internationalism of the All-India Congress and its leadership we recalled the profound explanation of Mahatma Gandhi when he said:

"There is no limit to extending our services to our neighbours across State-made frontiers. God never made these frontiers."

It would be a grave omission on our part if we failed to mention the close bonds that have existed between our people and the people of India, and to acknowledge the encouragement, the inspiration and the practical assistance we have received as a result of the international outlook of the All-India Congress.

The oldest existing political organization in South Africa, the Natal Indian Congress, was founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1894. He became its first secretary and in 21 years of his stay in South Africa we were to witness the birth of ideas and methods of struggle that have exerted an incalculable influence on the history of the peoples of India and South Africa. Indeed it was on South African soil that Mahatmaji founded and embraced the philosophy of Satyagraha.

After his return to India Mahatmaji's South African endeavours were to become the cause of the All-India Congress and the people of India as a whole. On the eve of India's independence Pandit Nehru said:

"Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we should redeem our pledge... At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps India will awaken to life and freedom. ... It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take a pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity."

Our people did not have to wait long to witness how uppermost our cause was in Panditji's mind when he made this pledge. The determination with which his gifted sister Mrs. Vijayalakshmi Pandit as free India's ambassador to the United Nations, won universal solidarity with our plight, made her the beloved spokesman of the voiceless masses not only of our country and Namibia but of people like ours throughout the world. We were gratified to see that the pronouncements and efforts of the Congress during the independence struggle were now being actively pursued as the policy of the Government of India.

At the Asian People's Conference in Delhi in 1947, at Bandung in 1955, at the Commonwealth deliberations, in the non-aligned movement, everywhere and at all times, Panditji and free India espoused our cause consistently.

Today we are deeply inspired to witness his equally illustrious daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, continue along the same path with undiminished vitality and determination. Her activities, her interest, her pronouncements, remain for us a constant source of hope and encouragement.

India's championing of our cause assumes all the more significance when we consider that ours is but one of the 153 countries which constitute the family of nations and our over 21 million people a mere fraction of the world's population. Moreover our hardships, though great, become small in the context of a turbulent world enveloped by conflict, wars, famine, malnutrition, disease, poverty, illiteracy and hatred.

However, it is precisely India's exemplary role in world affairs that also serves to remind us that our problems, acute as they are, are part of humanity's problems and no part of the world can dare consider itself free of them unless and until the day the last vestige of man-made suffering is eradicated from every corner of the world.

This knowledge of shared suffering, though formidable in dimension, at the same time keeps alive in us our oneness with mankind and our own global responsibilities that accrue therefrom. It also helps to strengthen our faith and belief in our future. To invoke once more the words of Panditji:

"In a world which is full of conflict and hatred and violence, it becomes more necessary than at any other time to have faith in human destiny. If the future we work for is full of hope for humanity, then the ills of the present do not matter much and we have justification for working for that future."

In this knowledge we forge ahead firm in our beliefs, strengthened by the devotion and solidarity of our friends; above all by an underlying faith in our own resources and determination and in the invincibility of our cause. We join with you, the people of India, and with people all over the world in our striving towards a new tomorrow, tomorrow making a reality for all mankind the sort of universe that the great Rabindranath Tagore dreamed of in Gitanjali:

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free;
where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
where words came out from the depths of truth;
where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
where the mind is led forward by these into ever widening thought and action
into that haven of Freedom, My Father, let my country awake."

Yours sincerely,
(Signed) Nelson Mandela

Mrs. Manorama Bhalla
Secretary
Indian Council for Cultural Relations
Indraprastha Estate, New Delhi
Republic of India

P.S. As will be seen from the above date, letter was given to the Officer Commanding Robben Island on the 3rd August 1980 for despatch to you by mail. I added that the matter should be treated urgently. Since then I have repeatedly enquired from the Department of Prisons as to whether the letter had been forwarded to you. Only during the last week in December was I told that I "could thank the Indian Council for Cultural Relations but not in the words used in the letter." For this reason I decided to use my own channels of reaching you.

NELSON MANDELA'S STATEMENTS IN THE COURT

"How can I be expected to believe that this same racial discrimination, which has been the cause of so much injustice and suffering right through the years, should now operate here to give me a fair and open trial?

"I consider myself neither morally nor legally obliged to obey laws made by a Parliament in which I am not represented. That the will of the people is the basis of the authority of government is a principle universally acknowledged as sacred throughout the civilized world."

"I hate race discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days. Even although I now happen to be tried by one, whose opinion I hold in high esteem, I detest most violently the set-up that surrounds me here. It makes me feel that I am a Black man in a White man's court. This should not be. I should feel perfectly at ease and at home with the assurance that I am being tried by a fellow South African, who does not regard me as an inferior, entitled to a special type of justice."

"I hate the practice of race discrimination, and in my hatred, I am sustained by the fact that the overwhelming majority of mankind hate it equally. I hate the systematic inculcation of children with colour prejudice and I am sustained in that hatred by the fact that the overwhelming majority of mankind, here and abroad, are with me in that. I hate the racial arrogance which decrees that the good things of life shall be retained as the exclusive right of a minority of the population, confining the majority to a position of subservience and inferiority, and maintaining them as voteless chattels to work where they are told and behave as they are told by the ruling minority. I am sustained in that hatred by the fact that the overwhelming majority of mankind both in this country and abroad are with mc. Nothing that this court can do to me will change in any way that hatred in me, which can only be removed by the removal of the injustice and inhumanity, which I have sought to remove from the political, social and economic life of this country.

"Whatever sentence Your Worship sees fit to impose upon me for the crime for which I have been convicted before this court, may it rest assured that when my sentence has been completed, I will still be moved, as men are always moved, by their conscience. I will still be moved by my dislike of the race discrimination against my people. When I come out from serving my sentence, I will take up again, as best I can, the struggle for the removal of those injustices until they are finally abolished once and for all."

MANDELA, TAMBO AND ANC:

REPORT OF THE COMMONWEALTH GROUP OF EMINENT PERSONS, 1986

[In 1985, at the Commonwealth Summit at Nassau in the Bahamas, the Heads of State or Government of 49 Commonwealth countries decided on exerting pressure for change in South Africa and appointed the Commonwealth Group of Eminent Persons to prepare a comprehensive report on South Africa.

The seven eminent members of the Group were Malcolm Fraser (Co-Chairman), former Prime Minister of Australia; General Olusegun Obasanjo (Co-Chairman), former Head of State of Nigeria; Lord Barber of Wentbridge, former Chancellor of Exchequer, Britain, and Chairman of the Standard Chartered Bank; Dame Nita Barrow (Barbados), Co-President of World Council of Churches, and former President of YWCA; John Malecela, former Foreign Minister of Tanzania; Sardar Swaran Singh, former Minister of External Affairs of India; and the Most Reverend Edward Walter Scott, Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Extracts are reproduced here courtesy Commonwealth Secretariat.]

The Release of Nelson Mandela and others
(From Chapter 3)

From the beginning, we recognized the essential significance in any political settlement of one man - Nelson Mandela. Imprisoned these last twenty-four years, latterly in Pollsmoor Prison, he is an isolated and lonely figure, bearing his incarceration with courage and fortitude, anxious to be reunited with his wife and family, but determined that this can only be in circumstances which allow for his unconditional release, along with colleagues and fellow political prisoners, and permit them all to take part in normal political activity.

A symbol to many, Nelson Mandela can be said to represent all those imprisoned, detained, banned or in exile for their opposition to apartheid: men like Wilton Mkwayi, Govan Mbeki, Zephania Mothupeng and John Ganya on Robben Island; Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni and Oscar Mpetha, also in Pollsmoor; Elias Matsoaledi and Harry Gwala in Johannesburg; Patrick Lekota and Popo Molefe in Modderbee; and many others. Certainly, that was the hope expressed by him in the statement, conveyed by his daughter, Miss Zindzi Mandela, to a meeting at the Jabulani Amphitheatre on February 10, 1985. The general question of political trials and the release of detainees is one we will return to later in our Report.

Mr. Mandela is himself a political prisoner. In 1964, he and nine others were convicted on a charge of sabotage. In his statement from the dock at the Rivonia Trial, he set out the reasons which led him to do what he did - the lengths to which the ANC had gone to avoid violence since its inception in 1912 and the repressive policies upholding apartheid which, he argued, had finally forced upon them a reactive violence.

He told the court that when the ANC had been declared an unlawful organization, it had refused to dissolve and had gone underground. It was only after that, in June 1961, that he had come to the conclusion that violence was inevitable and that it would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue with a policy of non-violence, when the Government had "met our demands with violence." Thereafter, it was decided that the ANC would "no longer disapprove of properly controlled sabotage," by which means the economy would be damaged and international attention attracted. He remains deprived of his liberty because he is not prepared to disavow that decision. As he himself has put it: "I am in prison as the representative of the people and the African National Congress, which was banned. What freedom am I being offered, while the organization of the people remains banned?" (Statement, February 10, 1985.)

But Nelson Mandela is also a symbol for Blacks not only of their lack of political freedom but also of their struggle to attain it. He is a potent inspiration for much of the political activity of Black South Africans. His role in the management of the Defiance Camp