I am an African, and I set my pride in my race over against a hostile public opinion. Men have tried to compare races on the basis of some equality. In all the works of nature, equality, if by it we mean identity, is an impossible dream! Search the universe! You will find no two units alike. The scientists tell us there are no two cells, no two atoms, identical. Nature has bestowed upon each a peculiar individuality, an exclusive patent from the great giants of the forest to the tenderest blade. Catch in your hand, if you please, the gentle flakes of snow. Each is a perfect gem, a new creation; it shines in its own glory - a work of art different from all of its aerial companions. Man, the crowning achievement of nature, defies analysis. He is a mystery through all ages and for all time. The races of mankind are composed of free and unique individuals. An attempt to compare them on the basis of equality can never be finally satisfactory. Each is self. My thesis stands on this truth; time has proved it. In all races, genius is like a spark, which, concealed in the bosom of a flint, bursts forth at the summoning stroke. It may arise anywhere and in any race.
I would ask you not to compare Africa to Europe or to any other continent.
I make this request not from any fear that such comparison might bring humiliation upon Africa. The reason I have stated, -a common standard is impossible! Come with me to the ancient capital of Egypt, Thebes, the city of one hundred gates. The grandeur of its venerable ruins and the gigantic proportions of its architecture reduce to insignificance the boasted monuments of other nations. The pyramids of Egypt are structures to which the world presents nothing comparable. The mighty monuments seem to look with disdain on every other work of human art and to vie with nature herself. All the glory of Egypt belongs to Africa and her people. These monuments are the indestructible memorials of their great and original genius. It is not through Egypt alone that Africa claims such unrivalled historic achievements. I could have spoken of the pyramids of Ethiopia, which, though inferior in size to those of Egypt, far surpass them in architectural beauty; their sepulchers which evince the highest purity of taste, and of many prehistoric ruins in other parts of Africa. In such ruins Africa is like the golden sun, that, having sunk beneath the western horizon, still plays upon the world which he sustained and enlightened in his career.
Oh, for that historian who, with the open pen of truth, will bring to Africa's claim the strength of written proof. He will tell of a race whose onward tide was often swelled with tears, but in whose heart bondage has not quenched the fire of former years. He will write that in these later days when Earth's noble ones are named, she has a roll of honor too, of whom she is not ashamed. The giant is awakening! From the four corners of the earth Africa's sons, who have been proved through fire and sword, are marching to the future's golden door bearing the records of deeds of valor done.
From these heights of the twentieth century I again ask you to cast your eyes south of the Desert of Sahara. If you could go with me to the oppressed Congos and ask, What does it mean, that now, for liberty, they fight like men and die like martyrs; if you would go with me to Bechuanaland, face their council of headmen and ask what motives caused them recently to decree so emphatically that alcoholic drinks shall not enter their country - visit their king, Khama, ask for what cause he leaves the gold and ivory palace of his ancestors, its mountain strongholds and all its august ceremony, to wander daily from village to village through all his kingdom, without a guard or any decoration of his rank - a preacher of industry and education, and an apostle of the new order of things; if you would ask Menelik what means this that Abyssinia is now looking across the ocean - oh, if you could read the letters that come to us from Zululand - you too would be convinced that the elevation of the African race is evidently a part of the new order of things that belong to this new and powerful period.
The African already recognizes his anomalous position and desires a change.
The brighter day is rising upon Africa. Already I seem to see her chains dissolved, her desert plains red with harvest, her Abyssinia and her Zululand the seats of science and religion, reflecting the glory of the rising sun from the spires of their churches and universities. Her Congo and her Gambia whitened with commerce, her crowded cities sending forth the hum of business, and all her sons employed in advancing the victories of peace-greater and more abiding than the spoils of war.
Yes, the regeneration of Africa belongs to this new and powerful period! By this term regeneration I wish to be understood to mean the entrance into a new life, embracing the diverse phases of a higher, complex existence. The basic factor which assures their regeneration resides in the awakened race-consciousness. This gives them a clear perception of their elemental needs and of their undeveloped powers. It therefore must lead them to the attainment of that higher and advanced standard of life.
The African people, although not a strictly homogeneous race, possess a common fundamental sentiment which is everywhere manifest, crystallizing itself into one common controlling idea. Conflicts and strife are rapidly disappearing before the fusing force of this enlightened perception of the true intertribal relation, which relation should subsist among a people with a common destiny. Agencies of a social, economic and religious advance tell of a new spirit which, acting as a leavening ferment, shall raise the anxious and aspiring mass to the level of their ancient glory. The ancestral greatness, the unimpaired genius, and the recuperative power of the race, its irrepressibility, which assures its permanence, constitute the African's greatest source of inspiration. He has refused to camp forever on the borders of the industrial world; having learned that knowledge is power, he is educating his children. You find them in Edinburgh, in Cambridge, and in the great schools of Germany. These return to their country like arrows, to drive darkness from the land. I hold that his industrial and educational initiative, and his untiring devotion to these activities, must be regarded as positive evidences of this process of his regeneration.
The regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilization is soon to be added to the world. The African is not a proletarian in the world of science and art. He has precious creations of his own, of ivory, of copper and of gold, fine, plated willow-ware and weapons of superior workmanship.
Civilization resembles an organic being in its development-it is born, it perishes, and it can propagate itself. More particularly, it resembles a plant, it takes root in the teeming earth, and when the seeds fall in other soils new varieties sprout up. The most essential departure of this new civilization is that it shall be thoroughly spiritual and humanistic -indeed a regeneration moral and eternal! O Africa! Like some great century plant that shall bloom In ages hence, we watch thee; in our dream See in thy swamps the Prospero of our stream; Thy doors unlocked, where knowledge in her tomb Hath lain innumerable years in gloom.
Then shalt thou, walking with that morning gleam, Shine as thy sister lands with equal beam
Pixley ka Seme was a founding member of the African National Congress and served as ANC President from 1930 to 1936.
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 center 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.
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 honor 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 realization 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 white 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.
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 that they alone are thus fitted and entitled as of right to own 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.
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 p.a. whilst that of an African child costs about £9 p.a. and that of an Indian child or Coloured child costs about £20 p.a.; 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.
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.
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 Shaka, who welded tribes together 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.
It may well be that South Africa's social system is a monument to racialism and race oppression, but its people are the 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.
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 have laboured unflinchingly. We shall continue to labour unflinchingly.
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 people of African descent alone. We demand them for all South Africa's, 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.
Courage that rises with danger 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 white man claims resolutely proprietary 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; organizations who share the outlook we embrace in countries scattered right across the face of the globe; the United Nations Organization jointly and some of its member-nations singly. In their defence of peace in the world through actively upholding the quality 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.
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 for 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 on 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.
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.
Chief Albert Luthuli was President of the ANC from 1952 to 1967. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961.
I am the First Accused. I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Arts and practised as an attorney in Johannesburg for a number of years in partnership with Oliver Tambo. I am a convicted prisoner serving five years for leaving the country without a permit and for inciting people to go on strike at the end of May 1961.
At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion made by the State in its opening that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did, both as an individual and as a leader of my people, because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.
In my youth in the Transkei I listened to the elders of my tribe telling stories of the old days. Amongst the tales they related to me were those of wars fought by our ancestors in defence of the fatherland. The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle. This is what has motivated me in all that I have done in relation to the charges made against me in this case.
Submit or Fight The African National Congress was formed in 1912 to defend the rights of the African people which had been seriously curtailed by the South Africa Act, and which were then being threatened by the Native Land Act. For thirty-seven years - that is until 1949 - it adhered strictly to a constitutional struggle. It put forward demands and resolutions; it sent delegations to the Government in the belief that African grievances could be settled through peaceful discussion and that Africans could advance gradually to full political rights. But White Governments remained unmoved, and the rights of Africans became less instead of becoming greater. In the words of my leader, Chief Lutuli, who became President of the ANC in 1952, and who was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize: 'who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately, and modestly at a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of moderation? The past thirty years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress, until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all'.
Even after 1949, the ANC remained determined to avoid violence. At this time, however, there was a change from the strictly constitutional means of protest which had been employed in the past. The change was embodied in a decision which was taken to protest against apartheid legislation by peaceful, but unlawful, demonstrations against certain laws. Pursuant to this policy the ANC launched the Defiance Campaign, in which I was placed in charge of volunteers. This campaign was based on the principles of passive resistance. More than 8,500 people defied apartheid laws and went to jail.
Yet there was not a single instance of violence in the course of this campaign on the part of any defier. I and nineteen colleagues were convicted for the role which we played in organizing the campaign, but our sentences were suspended mainly because the Judge found that discipline and non-violence had been stressed throughout.
This was the time when the volunteer section of the ANC was established, and when the word 'Amadelakufa' was first used: this was the time when the volunteers were asked to take a pledge to uphold certain principles.
Evidence dealing with volunteers and their pledges has been introduced into this case, but completely out of context. The volunteers were not, and are not, the soldiers of a black army pledged to fight a civil war against the whites. They were, and are. dedicated workers who are prepared to lead campaigns initiated by the ANC to distribute leaflets, to organize strikes, or do whatever the particular campaign required. They are called volunteers because they volunteer to face the penalties of imprisonment and whipping which are now prescribed by the legislature for such acts.
During the Defiance Campaign, the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act were passed. These Statutes provided harsher penalties for offences committed by way of protests against laws. Despite this, the protests continued and the ANC adhered to its policy of non-violence. In 1956, 156 leading members of the Congress Alliance, including myself, were arrested on a charge of high treason and charges under the Suppression of Communism Act. The non-violent policy of the ANC was put in issue by the State, but when the Court gave judgment some five years later, it found that the ANC did not have a policy of violence. We were acquitted on all counts, which included a count that the ANC sought to set up a communist state in place of the existing regime. The Government has always sought to label all its opponents as communists. This allegation has been repeated in the present case, but as I will show, the ANC is not, and never has been, a communist organization.
In 1960 there was the shooting at Sharpeville, which resulted in the proclamation of a state of emergency and the declaration of the ANC as an unlawful organization. My colleagues and I, after careful consideration, decided that we would not obey this decree. The African people were not part of the Government and did not make the laws by which they were governed. We believed in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that 'the will of the people shall be the basis of authority of the Government', and for us to accept the banning was equivalent to accepting the silencing of the Africans for all time. The ANC refused to dissolve, but instead went underground. We believed it was our duty to preserve this organization which had been built up with almost fifty years of unremitting toil. I have no doubt that no self-respecting White political organization At the beginning of June 1961, after a long and anxious assessment of the South African situation, I, and some colleagues, came to the conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the Government met our peaceful demands with force.
This conclusion was not easily arrived at. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe. We did so not because we desired such a course, but solely because the Government had left us with no other choice. In the Manifesto of Umkhonto published on 16 December 1961, which is Exhibit AD, we said: 'The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices - submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means in our power in defence of our people, our future, and our freedom'.
The Manifesto of Umkhonto was issued on the day that operations commenced.
The response to our actions and Manifesto among the white population was characteristically violent. The Government threatened to take strong action, and called upon its supporters to stand firm and to ignore the demands of the Africans. The Whites failed to respond by suggesting change; they responded to our call by suggesting the laager.
In contrast, the response of the Africans was one of encouragement.
Suddenly there was hope again. Things were happening. People in the townships became eager for political news. A great deal of enthusiasm was generated by the initial successes, and people began to speculate on how soon freedom would be obtained.
A land of extremes and remarkable contrasts South Africa is the richest country in Africa, and could be one of the richest countries in the world. But it is a land of extremes and remarkable contrasts. The whites enjoy what may well be the highest standard of living in the world, whilst Africans live in poverty and misery. Forty per cent of the Africans live in hopelessly overcrowded and, in some cases, drought-stricken Reserves, where soil erosion and the overworking of the soil makes it impossible for them to live properly off the land. Thirty per cent are labourers, labour tenants, and squatters on white farms and work and live under conditions similar to those of the serfs of the Middle Ages.
The other 30 per cent live in towns where they have developed economic and social habits which bring them closer in many respects to white standards.
Yet most Africans, even in this group, are impoverished by low incomes and high cost of living.
The complaint of Africans, however, is not only that they are poor and the whites are rich, but that the laws which are made by the whites are designed to preserve this situation. There are two ways to break out of poverty. The first is by formal education, and the second is by the worker acquiring a greater skill at his work and thus higher wages. As far as Africans are concerned, both these avenues of advancement are deliberately curtailed by legislation.
The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority.
Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion.
Menial tasks in South Africa are invariably performed by Africans. When anything has to be carried or cleaned the white man will look around for an African to do it for him, whether the African is employed by him or not.
Because of this sort of attitude, whites tend to regard Africans as a separate breed. They do not look upon them as people with families of their own; they do not realize that they have emotions - that they fall in love like white people do; that they want to be with their wives and children like white people want to be with theirs; that they want to earn enough money to support their families properly, to feed and clothe them and send them to school. And what 'house-boy' or 'garden-boy' or labourer can ever hope to do this? Pass laws, which to the Africans are among the most hated bits of legislation in South Africa, render any African liable to police surveillance at any time. I doubt whether there is a single African male in South Africa who has not at some stage had a brush with the police over his pass. Hundreds and thousands of Africans are thrown into jail each year under pass laws. Even worse than this is the fact that pass laws keep husband and wife apart and lead to the breakdown of family life.
Poverty and the breakdown of family life have secondary effects. Children wander about the streets of the townships because they have no schools to go to, or no money to enable them to go to school, or no parents at home to see that they go to school, because both parents (if there be two) have to work to keep the family alive. This leads to a breakdown in moral standards, to an alarming rise in illegitimacy, and to growing violence which erupts not only politically, but everywhere. Life in the townships is dangerous. There is not a day that goes by without somebody being stabbed or assaulted.
And violence is carried out of the townships in the white living areas. People are afraid to walk alone in the streets after dark. Housebreakings and robberies are increasing, despite the fact that the death sentence can now be imposed for such offences. Death sentences cannot cure the festering sore.
Africans want to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of doing, and not work which the Government declares them to be capable o Africans want to be allowed to live where they obtain work, and not be endorsed out of an area because they were not born there.
Africans want to be allowed to own land in places where they work, and not to be obliged to live in rented houses which they can never call their own.
Africans want to be part of the general population, and not confined to living in their own ghettoes. African men want to have their wives and children to live with them where they work, and not be forced into an unnatural existence in men's hostels. African women want to be with their menfolk and not be left permanently widowed in the Reserves. Africans want to be allowed out after eleven o'clock at night and not to be confined to their rooms like little children. Africans want to be allowed to travel in their own country and to seek work where they want to and not where the Labour Bureau tells them to. Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want security and a stake in society.
I am prepared to die! Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans.
This makes the white man fear democracy.
But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. Political division, based on colour, is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one colour group by another. The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism. When it triumphs it will not change that policy.
This then is what the ANC is fighting. Their struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live.
During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
Nelson Mandela was President of the ANC from 1991 to 1997. He was South Africa's first democratically-elected President, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
Q: You spoke earlier of the Congress Movement. Can you tell us something of the background of the alliance between the South African Indian Congress, the African National Congress and the other organisations of the Congress Movement?
Dr. Dadoo: Freedom is indivisible. A section of the population cannot be free if the rest is in bondage. In the course of their struggle against unjust laws, and for the redress of their grievances, the Indian people began to realise that no fundamental changes were possible without unity of action between all the oppressed people. And it was this realisation that made the younger members of the Indian Congress, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, set about trying to change the policies of the Congress in order to seek cooperation in the common struggle with the premier national organisation of the African people, the ANC, and with the national organisation of the Coloured people. A similar spirit also prevailed among the younger elements in the African political movement and in the Coloured community. This led to the formation of united front bodies to campaign to show the people that they must act unitedly, and to bring about changes in the national organisation (and necessary changes of leadership) to follow the new policies of cooperation and united struggle.
To bring about the changes in the Indian Congress, vigorous campaigns had to be conducted amongst the Indian people, and many bitter battles had to be fought against the 'moderate' leadership of the time. Members of the progressive groups were assaulted, sometimes brutally. In the Transvaal, a volunteer of the progressive group was actually killed.
But with the crushing of the moderate leadership it was possible for the Indian people once again to conduct a militant campaign - the Passive Resistance Campaign against Smuts` 'Ghetto Act' in 1946. This was entirely a struggle of the Indian people, but a few African and Coloured volunteers participated as a gesture of solidarity.
Simultaneously there was a change in the leadership of the ANC, and this made possible cooperation between the Indian Congress and the African National Congress through a pact known as the Xuma-Naicker-Dadoo Pact of 1947. After that many joint struggles were conducted, such as the stay-at-home on May 1, 1950, the stay-at-home on June 26, 1950 (the first South Africa Freedom Day), and the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign of 1952 in which over 8,000 volunteers of all races defied laws and went to prison.
Under the leadership of the ANC, in alliance with the organisations of the Indian and Coloured people, of the workers and of the progressive whites, the Congress of the People was held in 1955 - at which the Freedom Charter was adopted by over 3,000 delegates of all races. This Charter became the programme of all the organisations participating in the Congress Movement, and laid the basis for a united struggle for the transformation of South Africa. A Joint Consultative Council of all the organisations continued to operate until the premier organisation, the ANC, was banned in 1960.
Q: What, in your opinion, did the Indian Passive Resistance Campaign of 1946 and the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign in 1952 achieve?
Dr. Dadoo: With the departure of Gandhiji from South Africa in 1914 and with the removal from the political scene of some of his staunchest lieutenants because of death or old age, the leadership of the Indian community fell into the hands of 'moderates' who believed in compromising with the Government on each and every legislative measure of racial discrimination against the Indian people. The Indian Congress was reduced to representing, by and large, the voice of the small Indian merchant class only.
The campaign for all-out resistance against all discriminatory legislation conducted by the younger progressive group among the Indian people culminated not only in ousting the moderate leadership but also in transforming the Indian Congress into a mass organisation of the whole people.
The Indian Passive Resistance Campaign of 1946 against the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act, enacted by the Smuts Government brought together in a united struggle all sections: the working people who constituted 80 percent of the Indian community, the professional class and traders. The unity it wrought was indeed so powerful that not a single Indian accepted even the limited franchise which the Act offered.
The Campaign of 1946, furthermore, laid a strong basis among the Indian people for the subsequent unity with the African National Congress and the other organisations of the Congress Movement in the struggle for liberation.
The Campaign also made a significant impact internationally. It made the Indian community appreciate more fully the importance of international solidarity in the world-wide struggle against racialism, colonialism and imperialism. At the request of the SAIC, India demonstrated her solidarity by breaking off relations with South Africa and imposing economic sanctions.
At its request India also took up the treatment of the South Africans of Indian and Pakistani origin at the United Nations. This was soon broadened to include the whole question of apartheid. Thus it is that the question of the apartheid policies of the fascist South African Government has been on the agenda of the United Nations Organisation ever since its inception.
The Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign, similarly, not only increased the attention of the world to the liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples; it also welded the masses of the African, Coloured and Indian peoples into a united force. Furthermore, it gave rise to the formation of the Congress of Democrats, a small but active group of white democrats, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, who later joined the united front, popularly known as the Congress Alliance.
Q: What precise role do you expect the Indian people to play in this new phase of the struggle?
Dr. Dadoo: As an integral part of the South African population, the Indian community of half a million people has a very important role to play in the new form the struggle has taken. As a leader of the Indian people, it is my duty to ask them to respond unreservedly to the call made by the Acting President of the African National Congress, our comrade Oliver Tambo, in which he says: 'As our forces drive deeper into the south we have no doubt that they will be joined not by some, but by the whole African nation; by the oppressed minorities, the Indian and Coloured people; and by an increasing number of white democrats'.
The militant Indian youth, who played not an insignificant part in the early struggles of Umkhonto since 1961 - several of them are serving long terms of imprisonment on Robben Island and in other South African jails together with their African, Coloured and White comrades-in-arms - have yet a larger role to play in the liberation army, and in mobilising the Indian people in town and country to support and help the freedom fighters in every possible way.
The Indian people must and will, I am certain, help to make the path of freedom fighters easy. They must also mount ever-increasing resistance to every aspect of apartheid: the Group Areas Act must not be allowed to govern them; they must oppose and reject the regime's stooge body, the South African Indian Council, which is being used by Vorster as an instrument to obtain the collaboration of the Indian people in the implementation of apartheid policies. Every form of opposition to apartheid is of help to the freedom fighters in the war against white supremacy.
Q: The argument has often been put to the Indian people in South Africa that as a minority group they would be no better off under African rule than they are under white rule. In the light of what has happened in Kenya, for instance, what is your answer to this argument?
Dr. Dadoo: This is absolute nonsense - it is merely the tactics of divide and rule used by the authorities in order to maintain the divisions of the people, as they already do by law, keeping the national groups apart and preventing intercommunication. This is the argument of the South African Police who seek to intimidate the people from participating in the struggle; it is the argument of their agents provocateurs in our midst who deliberately try to provoke hostility between African and Indian, African and Coloured, to convince each that their grievances are not the fault of an oppressive government, but of another oppressed group. They use this tactic precisely because it is our unity in the face of oppression that the oppressor most fears.
It must be understood that the fundamental of the liberation struggle is first and foremost the liberation of the majority of the population, the African people, and that it is unthinkable that there could be liberation without African majority rule.
Dr Yusuf Dadoo was a former President of the South African Indian Congress and Chairman of the South African Communist Party.
Some decades ago, South Africa was held in high esteem as a senior member of the British Commonwealth, a bastion of western capitalism, and the most advanced economic region in Africa. Her people, black and white, could claim with some justification that their material conditions were the best in Africa. The south had the highest national income per head of population, the largest volume of trade, and the widest scope of opportunity for acquiring education or obtaining employment. Men from east and central Africa went south in search of higher wages or higher learning.
Three centuries of white settlement - phased by colonial wars, expropriations of tribal lands, slavery, forced labour and industrialism -had produced a variety of human types, an integrated multi-racial society and a way of life shared by some members of all racial groups. Colour prejudice was endemic and deeply ingrained among whites; but their policy of racial discrimination, though vicious and degrading, differed in degree rather than in kind from the discrimination practised elsewhere under colonial rule.
If racism was most bitter and intense in the south, it experienced a measure of compensation in a countervailing radicalism that stretched across the colour line in pursuit of an open-ended, non-racial social order. Nowhere else in Africa did so many whites, Asians and Coloured participate with Africans in a common struggle against class or colour oppression. A peaceful transition to parliamentary democracy without colour bars seemed plausible to some observers, as the tide of decolonization began to swell at the end of the war.
Twenty years of unbroken rule by Afrikaner nationalism have all but destroyed the hope of a peaceful revolution. South Africa remains by far the largest producer of goods and capital in Africa. Her public services - the infrastructure of political and economic organization - are still the most advanced. Her standards of public morality, law enforcement and race relations have deteriorated to such a level, however, that she is now a byword among nations for bigotry, intolerance and despotic rule. She has been turned into a police state under the control of a white oligarchy which uses fascist techniques to enforce racial totalitarianism and to suppress movements for social equality.
A wide gulf has consequently opened between the south and the rest of Africa. Millions of men and women in countries north of the Zambezi are being exhorted and trained for the tremendous task of modernizing their societies. Southern Africans, in contrast, are being forcibly regrouped - by a white bureaucracy - into tribal communities under hereditary chiefs.
Thousands of Africans in the independent states occupy the highest positions in government, education, industry, commerce and finance positions of a kind that are reserved for whites only in the south.
The balance of advantage is being tilted in favour of regions that are still considered backward by southern standards. The best that black and brown South Africans with professional qualifications can do for themselves is to escape to these countries, where their skin colour is a social asset and where they can apply their skills with dignity and in freedom. For, as long as they remain under white man's rule, they must expect to be outstripped in every field of social activity by their self-governing racial compatriots in the north.
Southern Africans have taken up arms against white supremacists to redress the balance. The freedom fighters are the vanguard of a people preparing to rise for the recovery of lost liberties and for the right to move freely on terms of equality with all men at home and abroad. Their struggle is an old one. It began 300 years ago, when the brown men of the Cape - the Nama who were called Hottentot and the Khoi who were called Bushmen - fought the white invaders with bows, arrows and spears. Bantu-speaking warriors -the Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana and Venda - continued the struggle, until each nation in turn was defeated and absorbed in the white man's order.
Wars of independence were succeeded by a struggle from within the industrialized society for parliamentary democracy, national liberation, or socialism. This book traces the interactions between the two main streams of resistance to white domination: the national movements of Africans, Indians and Coloured; and the class struggles of socialists and communists.
Whether wage worker or peasant, businessman or professional, intellectual or chief, no African was admitted to parliament, municipal councils, the army, civil service, mining and financial houses, or managerial and technical posts. The African elite included men and women who would have risen to eminence in any open society; yet all were relegated by reason of race to a civic status lower than that of the meanest white. All Africans endured the humiliation and restrictive effects of pass laws, racial classification, residential segregation, and discrimination in public life. None could escape the state's coercive sanctions.
The African National Congress spoke for the entire African population when it presented a claim to full citizenship. The achievements of Congress were considerable. It exposed the myths of white superiority and prevented them from hardening into sacred taboos. It kept the spirit of resistance alive and prevented Africans from sinking into a condition of submissiveness, of apathetic acquiescence in white power. It awakened a national consciousness that transcended language, tribal, provincial and class barriers. It gave the people dignity, pride in their cultural heritage, and a determination to regain their land and liberty. By refusing to compromise, or to accept less than total integration into the entire range of political and economic institutions, Congress stripped white South Africa of its humanitarian pretensions and revealed the true face of apartheid for all the world to see.
Jack and Ray Simons were leading members of the ANC and South African Communist Party.
Modem political science recognises the fact that social systems are founded on definite historical origins. If the saying 'out of nothing, nothing comes' is true, then it must follow that the future is formed and derives its first impulse in the womb of the present. All societies therefore necessarily bear the imprint, the birth-marks of their own past and whether to a greater or lesser extent must depend on a whole concatenation of factors, both internal and external to each particular society.
Those of us who claim to be revolutionaries, must resist all attempts to persuade us that our future lies in the hands of an ungovernable fate. For the imperative of our epoch has charged us with the task of transforming ourselves from the status of objects of history to that of masters of history.
We must, by liberating ourselves, make our own history. Such a process by its nature imposes on the activist the necessity to plan and therefore requires the ability to measure cause and effect; the necessity to strike in correct directions and hence the requirement to distinguish between essence and phenomenon; the necessity to move millions of people as one man to actual' victory and consequently the development of the skill of combining the necessary and the possible.
Rise of Capitalism and Colonial Expansion To understand South Africa we must appreciate the fact and fix it firmly in our minds that here we are dealing with a class society. In South Africa the capitalists, the bourgeoisie are the dominant class. Therefore the state, other forms of social organisation and the 'official' ideas are conditioned by this one fact of the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. In its essential features South Africa conforms to other societies where this class feature is dominant.
Yet a cursory comparative glance around the world would seem to suggest that such a statement is hardly of any use in helping us to understand the seemingly unique reality of apartheid South Africa. More and perhaps better explanation is called for. The landing of the employees of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope 326 years ago, in 1652, represented in embryo the emergence of class society in our country. And that class society was bourgeois society in its infancy.
The settlers of 1652 were brought to South Africa by the dictates of that brutal period of the birth of the capitalist class which has been characterised as the stage of the primitive accumulation of capital`.
Of this stage Marx wrote: 'The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in the mines of the aboriginal' population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.' 1 'The transformation of the individualised and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series - of forcible methods... The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious,' so wrote Marx. 2 Such indeed was the slave trade; (such also incidentally the eviction of the Scottish Highland peasants many of whom came to settle here in Canada-vandalism of the most merciless kind.) Such indeed was the expropriation of the African peasantry.
It should therefore come as no surprise that six years after the arrival of the Dutch settlers, in 1658, the first group of slaves arrived in the Cape Colony.
In 1806, when England seized the Cape Colony from Holland by force of arms, there were 30,000 slaves in the Colony as against 26,000 settlers. There were also another 20,000 'free Coloured, Nama and in white employ...' 3 Equally, it should come as no surprise that these 20,000 African wage-earners had been compelled into this position by the process, described by Marx and other historians of the period, of the 'expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence and from the means of labour...' Described as 'free' in relation to the 30,000 slaves in the Colony, they were also 'free' in so far as they had been liberated by force of arms, disease and starvation from their status as independent producers with their own hunting, grazing and arable land, their livestock and their working implements.
Calvin's Doctrine distorted Nowhere is this clearer than in the fate that befell Calvinist theology.
Tawney has said that: 'Calvinism was an active and radical force...(Its adherents were) disposed neither to idealise the patriarchal virtues of the peasant community, nor to regard with suspicion the mere fact of capitalist enterprise in commerce and finance... Calvinism was largely an urban movement... (Its teachings were directed primarily) to the classes engaged in trade and industry, who formed the most modern and progressive elements in the life of the age...' 6 Writing of a British Governor-General in India, Marx says: 'His favourites received contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes sprang up like mushrooms in a day; primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a shilling.'4 And there we have the reason why Europe carried out this early accumulation at home and abroad with such merciless enthusiasm and passion - because the process assured men of property stupendous and immediate profit. Brought up in this European hothouse of rapine, the settlers in South Africa could not but continue this process in their colony. The result was that when England abolished the slave trade in 1834, 'nearly two centuries after the arrival of the first batch of slaves, the descendants of the original colonists rebelled against this decision.
Judging themselves too weak to reimpose slavery by arms, the Boers resolved to take themselves out of the area of British jurisdiction. Thus began the so-called Great Trek of the Boers into the interior of our country.
Of course, all along, the Boers were determined that again they would have to seize our land and livestock and enslave our people.
We see therefore that the methods and practices of primitive accumulation which represented a transitional phase in the development of capital in Europe, assumed permanence in the South African economy and life-style of the Boers. They acquired a fixity characteristic of feudal society, legitimised by the use of force and sanctified by a supposedly Calvinist Christianity.
The South African settlers of 1652 had themselves been the expropriated of Europe. But, as in America, here in Canada, in Australia and elsewhere, after a little while, they were able to re-establish themselves as independent producers, acquiring land in the manner we have described, on the basis of the expropriation of our people, despite the most fierce resistance of the indigenous people.
It was exactly the blissful regaining of their status as masters of their own house, their re-emergence as independent producers, that froze the Boer community at a particular moment of historic time and thereby guaranteed their regression.
Thrown up by the birth of a higher social system, they reverted precisely to that natural economy which capital was so vengefully breaking up. But capital had already taught them that in the pursuit of a better life, everything, including murder, was permissible and legitimate.
A natural economy presupposes the absence of accumulation, 'consisting of the petty dealings of peasants and craftsmen in the small market town, where industry is carried on for the subsistence of the household and the consumption of wealth follows hard upon the production of it, and where commerce and finance are occasional incidents, rather than the forces which keep the whole system in motion.'5 Thus it is the direct opposite of a capitalist economy even when the latter is at its primitive stage of accumulation.
When they reverted to a patriarchal economy, the Boers therefore abandoned all that was dynamic and revolutionary in the formation of bourgeois society and transmuted the rest into something stultified and reactionary.
The Boers had brought this Calvinism with them from Holland and were joined later by the Calvinist French Huguenots. But when they grafted this eminently bourgeois theology onto their patriarchal economy, they in fact transformed its content into a species of Lutheranism, which was essentially a theological school which sought to idealise feudalism and save it from destruction by the capitalist mode of production which was springing up all around it.
From Calvinism the Boer took the doctrine of predestination and perverted it.
For Calvin, the chosen of God were those who survived the jungle of capitalist enterprise in industry and trade and emerged as successful men of business, without regard to race or nationality.
In the patriarchal economy this was transmuted to read: the chosen of God are those who are white. For his part Luther had said: 'An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs, some rulers, others subjects.' 7 Racism, today so much part of South African reality, constituted a justification, an attempt to rationalise, to make acceptable the enslavement and expropriation of the black people by the white.
In Boer society and in the end among almost all the Whites, racism as an ideology, squired the attributes of a psychological fixation, with the characteristic of fixated behaviour that an ineluctably irrational perception of a particular set of relationships coexists with and distorts the perception of all other sets of relationships. In the circumstance that, in any case, ideological formations bear a complex rather than a simple relationship with the material world, generating a momentum which carries them beyond the material conditions that created them, we could expect that this racism would in time present itself as an autonomous force, God-given or nature-given, as an incontrovertible condition of human existence.
To go back to Calvin, where his theology had sanctified individualism to detach the bourgeoisie from the narrow and rigid world of feudalism and thrown him, unhampered by old prejudices, Into the world market, the Boers sang praises to a stultified individualism even narrower than that of the feudal epoch, an individualism which drew its strength from the economic self sufficiency of each Boer family, the isolation of the homesteads one from another and the isolation of a whole community from the rest of the world; an individualism which became truly itself and complete only to the extent that it despised and set itself in contrast to everything that was black: an individualism therefore which was and is characterised by a rapid racism.
British Involvement British capital subdued this petrified and arrogant individualism during the Anglo-Boer War. In 1910 Boer and Briton entered into a social contract in which the Briton undertook to help ease the Boer out of the Dark Ages while promising to respect his traditions. For his part, the Boer pledged' not to resist the advance and domination of British capital.
Between them, Boer and Briton agreed that they would share political power and, finally, that the indigenous African population would not be party to this contract but would be kept under the domination and at the disposal of the signatories, to be used by them in whatever manner they saw fit.
There were therefore written into this agreement, the so-called Act of Union of 1910, the continuation of the methods and practices of exploitation characteristic of primitive accumulation of capital which had remained fossilised in the Boer economy but which British capital had outgrown, certainly in Britain.
Why did the British ruling class, having won the war against the Volksraad, thus regress? One reason of course is that we; are here dealing with the post 1885 Berlin Conference period. It could therefore be argued that the predominant colonialist practices and attitudes of the time made natural and inevitable that the British ruling class would do in South Africa what it was doing in other colonies.
Yet this explanation would not be complete. For Britain had maintained an uninterrupted colonial hold on South Africa, to one extent or another, since 1806.
The decisive point to bring to the fore is that British capital, throughout the 100 years before 1910, had itself, in South Africa, clung tenaciously to the methods and practices of primitive accumulation.
Thus while in 1807 the British administration prohibited the importation of slaves into the Cape Colony, in 1909 it introduced a vagrancy Act directed at the Khoi people. 8 Under this law, all Khoi people not in the employ of a white person were declared vagrants. Vagrancy was made an offence. To prove that one was not a vagrant one had to produce a pass. To get the pass you had to enter into a written labour contract with a white employer.
This measure was introduced to meet the labour short-fall created by the non-importation of slaves. It was therefore used to drive those Khoi people who still maintained an independent existence, off the land, to turn them into permanent wage earners and to create the means to direct this labour where it was needed.
In the end, it was the British armies which defeated the African people, the British who drove us off our lands, broke up the natural economy and social systems of the indigenous people. It was they who imposed taxes on the African peasants and, starting with the Masters and Servant's' Act of 1856, laid down the labour laws which govern the black worker in South Africa today.
In Europe, the economic freedom of the worker to hire himself out freely to the highest bidder, which came with and was part of the bourgeois revolution was of course connected with, accompanied and enhanced by the political freedom of the worker to represent themselves in matters of state through the vote, itself an integral part of the victory of the bourgeoisie over feudal society.
In South Africa this was not to be. Here, the capitalist inherited the rights of the feudal lord and appropriated to himself the right to determine where, when, at what price and under what conditions the African shall sell his labour power to the capitalist. He also appropriated to himself the right to decide 'what is good for the native'.
It is therefore clear that British capital in South Africa differed from the Boer patriarchal economy with relation to primitive accumulation in two major respects.
The first of these was that it outgrew chattel slavery and therefore abolished it: the second, that, as capital, its aim continued to be that of greater and greater accumulation, through the pursuit of maximum profit.
It was therefore inevitable that British capital would be all that more thorough in the expropriation of the African peasant, all that more brutal in the exploitation of African labour, more scientific and less wasteful.
The historic compromise between the British bourgeoisie and the Boer peasantry represented hence not an historical aberration but the continued pursuit of maximum profit in conditions of absolute freedom for capital to pursue its inherent purposes.
British capital had at other times and in other circumstances made other compromises. One of the most important of these was undoubtedly that made with the British working class.
In its struggle against its feudal predecessors, the British bourgeoisie had called upon and received the support of the working people. It therefore had to take cognisance of the fact that its political victory did not belong to it alone.
It further took note of the fact that the denial of political freedoms to its ally while claiming them as a natural right for itself, posed the danger that these working masses would pass beyond the struggle against the feudal lords and take on the bourgeoisie itself.
While convincing the workers of the sacredness of private property.
especially its own, bourgeois property, it nevertheless conceded them their political democracy. Thereby and mainly because of this concession, it destroyed the possibility for capital to continue using primitive methods of accumulation within Britain.
Capital in South Africa never had to contend with such a situation.
Historically, it owes the working class nothing and has therefore conceded to it nothing, (excepting of course the white workers, about whom later.) It is clear that during its war with the so-called Boer republics, the British ruling class consciously avoided putting itself in a state of indebtedness to the black people. For instance, in January 1901, Lord Milner, the British High Commissioner 'told a Coloured deputation... that he could not accept their offer to take up arms against the republican forces.'9 The same thing happened when another Boer rebellion had to be put down in 1914.
That the bourgeoisie was aware that the denial of democratic rights to the workers was in the interests of capitalism was evident when indentured labour was imported from China after the Anglo-Boer war.
Then, the mine-bosses stated that'a big body of enfranchised white workers 'would simply hold the Government of the country in the hollow of their hand' and 'more or less dictate not only on the question of wages, but also on political questions'. 10 Translating the advantages of black worker disenfranchisement into cash, the Chamber of Mines stated in its 1910 Annual Report that it 'viewed the native purely as a machine, requiring a certain amount of fuel' It decreed accordingly that the diet of the African miners living in the mine compounds should be determine in Arms of the formula 'the minimum amount of food which will give them maximum amount of work.' 11 Of the bourgeois countries, South Africa is unique to the extent that profit maximisation is the overt, unhidden and principal objective of state policy, and can therefore be regarded with respect to this characteristic as an almost perfect model of capitalism, cleansed of everything that is superfluous its essential characterisation; a model which displays to all, in their true nakedness, the inner motive forces of this social system and its fundamental inter-connections.
The position that black people occupy in this model can be defined as follows:
This may sound harsh and anti-human but it characterises 'pure capitalism'.
Let us see for instance what Marcuse in his studies of Max Weber had to say: 'The 'formally most rational' mode of capital accounting is the one into which man and his 'purposes' enter only as variables in the calculation of the chances of gain and profit. In this formal rationality, mathematimisation is carried to the point of the calculus with the real negation of life itself...'12 If this sounds too abstract, the white South African Member of Parliament G.F. Froneman translates it into the concrete when he says: '(within white society, Africans) are only supplying a commodity, the commodity of labour...It is labour we w importing (into the white areas) and not labourers as individuals...'13 Froneman went on to say that the numbers of Africans to be found in the so-called white areas therefore make no difference to the composition of Society-society with a capital S-precisely because the African is not an individual, comparable to a white individual.
Rather, he is the repository of the commodity labour power, which can and must be quantified in a profit and loss account to the point of the very 'negation of life itself'. In that very real sense the African therefore belongs to the category of commodities to an equal extent as gold, diamonds and any other commodity you care to mention, to be bought and sold.
hoarded and even destroyed depending exclusively on the state of the market.
The denial of the humanity of the Slav' which occurred during the period of primitive accumulation of capital is therefore repeated here but at a higher and more rational level.
That rationality demands that to ensure maximum profit that portion of the national wealth which accrues to the black people as consume' should be kept at the barest minimum.
Consequently, the real wages of the African mined are today lower than they were in 1911. 14 Note also the almost total absence of social security benefits for the African people. To provide these benefits would be to increase the cost of reproduction of the producer and conversely to decrease capital's show of the national cake.
It might be argued that our thesis might begin to collapse when we tackle the question of the white worked.
Appearance would have it that in maintaining a white labour aristocracy, capital is behaving in a most irrational fashion, that capital itself has become so impregnated with racial prejudice that it cannot seek to extract maximum profit from a white worker.
Yet we must bear in mind that the capitalist class does not view itself solely as the appropriator of wealth in contradistinction to our being the producers.
The capitalist class is also heavily burdened with matters of state administration. It has taken on itself the task of ruling our country. As early as November 1899, Lord Milner had said: 'The ultimate end (of British policy) is a self-governing white Community, supported by well treated and justly governed black labour from Cape Town to Zambesi (sic).' 15 A principal pre-occupation of this self-governing community must therefore be to ensure that the 'justly-treated and well-governed' do not one day rise up and transform themselves also into a self-governing community.
From the very beginning,British capital knew that it had to face this possibility and that if it fought without any allies; it would lose in such a confrontation.
The historic compromise of 1910 has therefore this significance that in granting the vanquished Boer equal political and social status with the British victor, it imposed on both the duty to defend the status quo against especially those whom that.status quo defined as the dominated.
The capitalist class, to whom everything has a cash value, has never considered moral incentives as very dependable. As part of the arrangement, it therefore decided that material incentives must play a prominent part.
It consequently bought out the whole white population. It offered a price to the white workers and the Afrikaner farmers in exchange for an undertaking that they would shed their blood in defence of capital.
Both worker and farmer, like Faustus, took the devil's offering and, like Faustus, they will have to pay on the appointed day.
The workers took the offering in monthly cash grants and reserved jobs.
The farmers took their share by having black labour, including and especially prison labour directed to the farms. They also took it in the form of huge subsidies and loans to help them maintain a 'civilised standard of living'.
The indebtedness of these farmers to the profit-making bourgeois in 1966 was equal to $1.25 billion, amounting to nearly 12 per cent of the gross national product.16 In 1947 a commission of the Dutch Reformed Church included in its report the prophetic words: 'In the country, one feels dependent on God; in the towns on men, such as one's employer.' 17 In the struggle that marks the growing onslaught of the black producers on the society of the parasites, the white worker will have to pay for that dependence on the employer-industrialist, the white farmer for that dependence on the employer-creditor.
The God of Calvin is a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate him: the God of Capital will after all have his pound of flesh! Engels wrote in 1895 that: 'When Bismarck found himself compelled to introduce (universal) franchise as the only means of interesting the mass of the people in 0a plans, our workers immediately took it in earnest and sent August Bebel to the first constituent Reichstag. And from that day on, they have used the franchise in a way which has paid them a thousandfold and has sewed as a model to the workers of all countries. The franchise has been...
transformed by them from a means of deception, which it was before, into an instrument of emancipation...And so it happened that the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than the illegal action of the workers' party, of the result of elections than those of rebellion.' Engels continues: 'Of course, our... comrades do not thereby, in the least renounce their right to revolution. The right to revolution is, after all, the only really 'historical right', the only right on which all modem states without exception rest...' 18 Yet it came to pass that in large measure the working class of western Europe and North America did in fact for some time anyway renounce its right to revolution.
Some of the mass parties of the workers became parties of Order and Reform.
And to the extent that bourgeois Law and Order was the basis on which the proletariat founded its trade unions and secured for itself higher wages, better working conditions and the right to strike, this was an inevitable outcome.
That bourgeois Law and Order also gave the proletariat the right to form its own political party and the right to install that party in power, all within the legal framework of bourgeois democracy.
In the work from which we have just quoted Engels says: 'The irony of world history turns everything upside down. The Parties (of the property owning class) ... are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves.
They cry despairingly...legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life eternal...
(There) is nothing left for them to do but themselves break through this fatal legality.' 19 The condition of the black workers of South Africa, the place in society allocated to us by the capitalist class, demands that we must assert our right to revolution.
Capital in its South African mould turns things right side up again. We are perishing under the legal conditions created by the bourgeoisie whereas they, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life eternal. We have no choice but to break down this fatal legality.
For the burden of our argument has been exactly this that in the totality of the social relations that describe the apartheid system, we have a place only and exclusively in so far as we are 'the ragged trousered philanthropists'-the exploited producers. We are otherwise the outsiders, the excluded-on our own continent, in our country! In this context, take the Bantustan programme. In its objectives stated by the creators of this policy, the black producers will have the right to be complete human beings only in these areas which have been set aside as our so-called homelands.
Otherwise, when we enter so called white South Africa, we have the following dramatis personae: 'He who (is the) money-owner...strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but -a hiding.' 20 The Bantustan policy is therefore not a deus ex machina, a contrived and inartistic solution of a difficulty in the drama of South African life.
Rather, it is but the legal codification, the pure representation in juridical form, of the centuries-old socio-economic reality of the alienation of the black producer from the society which he daily produces and reproduces.
At the level of abstraction, there are two alternatives out of this condition -available to the black workers.
One of these is to cut the umbilical cord that ties us to bourgeois South Africa, for us to cease to be producers on somebody else's account. What would then happen? We could then join the demi-monde of the thieves and murderers, the pimps and prostitutes and, by becoming true and complete outcasts, recast ourselves in the parasitic model of our bourgeois progenitor, outside the bounds of bourgeois legality. Such an alternative is obviously absurd.
The racist regime is on the other hand pushing us into the Bantustans. This constitutes a death sentence for thousands of our people. For South Africa's land policy, of which the Bantustans are the historical outcome, is founded precisely on the land dispossession of the African people which ensures that hunger compels us to bang our own hides to market.
The second, and in fact, the only historically justifiable and inevitable alternative is that we cling very firmly to our position as producers, that we hoist the bourgeoisie with its own petard.
The irony of the South African situation is that exactly because capital permits us to enter the city, to pass through the sacred portals of a white church, and set foot in the even more sacred sanctuary of madame's bedroom, but only as workers, capital thereby indicates to us daily that it is in fact our labour that makes the city to live, that gives voice to the predikant, the preacher and provides-the necessary conditions for procreation.
Since then we are, in a very real sense, the creators of society, what remains for us is to insist and ensure that that society is made in our image and that we have dominion over it.
In as much as the producer and the parasite who feeds on the producer represent antithetical forces, the one working, the other idle; the one wanting to escape the obligation of the nurse-maid and the other striving to ensure that he is for ever the fed, in as much therefore must a South Africa over which we have dominion be the antithesis of a present-day South Africa.
The Freedom Charter That free South Africa must therefore redefine the black producer or rather, since we the people shall govern, since we shall have through our own struggle, placed ourselves in the position of makers of history and policy and no longer objects, we shall redefine our own position as follows:
In my view, this redefinition contains within it the theoretical basis of the Freedom Charter, the political programme of the African National Congress adopted in 1956.
It should be of some interest to point out that this programme was written exclusively on the basis of demands submitted by thousands upon thousands of ordinary workers, peasants, businessmen, intellectuals and other professional people, the youth and women of all nationalities of South Africa.
It is a measure of their maturity that these masses should have so clearly understood the fundamental direction of their aspirations. It is a demonstration in practice of how much the bourgeoisie, by refusing to temper its greed, did ultimately teach us to identify our true interests without any equivocation.
Whenever we stand up and say 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people...',21 we always meet with three different reactions.
This is what a free South Africa will be like. For as the masses themselves long discovered, the antithesis to white supremacy, exclusiveness and arrogance is not a black version of the same practice.
In the physical world, black might indeed be the opposite of white. But in the world of social systems, social theory and practice have as much to do with skin pigmentation as has the birth of children with the stork. To connect the two is to invent a fable with the conscious or unconscious purpose of hiding reality.
The act of negating the theory and practice of white apartheid racism, the revolutionary position, is exactly to take the issue of colour, race, national and sex differentiation out of the sphere of rational human thinking and behaviour, and thereby expose all colour, race, nation and sex prejudice as irrational.
Our own rational practical social activity, rational in the sense of being anti-racist and non-racist, constitutes such a negation; it constitutes the social impetus and guarantee of the withering away of this irrationality.
Consider the circumstances in which we might position 'black capitalism' as the antithesis to 'white capitalism'. Fortunately, Fanon has already warned us that one of the results of imperialist domination is that in the colonial middle class 'the dynamic pioneer aspect, the characteristics of the inventor and the discoverer of new worlds which are found in all national bourgeoisies are lamentably absent.' 'In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the west. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will to succeed of youth.' 22 Thus black capitalism instead of being the antithesis is rather confirmation of parasitism with no redeeming features whatsoever, without any extenuating circumstances to excuse its existence. If you want to see a living example, go to the Transkei.
Even more, by thus expelling racism to the realm of the irrational by our own practice we would help to deny those who want to exploit and oppress others, including our very selves, the possibility of finding justification for their actions in such prejudices.
We particularly, who are the products 'of exemplary capitalist exploitation, must remember that when German capital found opportunity, especially during the 2nd World War, to revert to primitive forms of accumulation, under the stimulation of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious, lilt used exactly these prejudices literally to enslave and slaughter millions of people.
We must remember that the exploitation of the so-called gastarbeiter in Western Europe today is founded, in part, on contempt for their nationality: that in the United States and Northern Ireland the black and Irish worker respectively are oppressed and exploited on the basis of colour and national prejudice.
The charge of traitor might stick if we were to advance a programme of equality between black and white while there remained between these two communities the relations of exploiter and exploited.
But we have already said that our victory presupposes the abolition of parasitism and the re-integration of the idle rich as productive members of society as well as our writing off the debt of the white worker and farmer so that they can start again afresh, as equals with other producers, in law and in every other respect, without the heavy weight of blood money in their pockets and on their consciences.
The Freedom Charter itself says that 'the national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people.' It also goes on to say 'all the land (shall be) redivided among those who work it to banish famine and hunger.' 23 We believe sincerely that it is only in conditions of such an equality as is underpinned by these provisions that we shall each be able to discover and unfold our true individuality, require the right to be human, and thereby create the conditions for the creative realisation of the considerable talent of our people, both black and white, which today is so firmly stifled by the suffocating purposes of a small exploiting and oppressive minority.
Thabo Mbeki has been President of the ANC since 1997. He was elected President of South Africa in the country's second democratic election in June 1999.
The most senior leaders of the oppressed people of South Africa have been in prison for almost a quarter of a century now. They, who would have contributed so enormously to the making of a prosperous, happy and peaceful society, whose leadership would have moved millions to strive for the achievement of this goal, these have been condemned to commune only with the prison guards for the rest of their natural lives.
While these titans of freedom pounded rocks and sewed mailbags behind prison walls, those who had issued the command that they should be jailed were busy imprisoning a whole society. They decreed that none shall speak of anything except what the gaolers permitted to be said; that none shall act according to their consciences except with the authorisation of the gendarme. They proclaimed that the truth shall not be told except that which the regime of repression deemed to be the truth. They, on the other hand, would have the right to designate oppression as liberty; those who are enslaved would be described as free men and women, while he or she that dared to fight for genuine freedom would be categorised and treated as a criminal.
The cause for which our people are paying the supreme sacrifice daily and for which Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Harry Gwala, Ahmed Kathrada, Elias Motsoaledi and others have been sentenced to life imprisonment, has a significance which extends far beyond the borders of our country.
Pernicious Ideology of Racism For, what they are fighting against is the pernicious ideology of racism, the accumulated refuse of centuries of an anti-human prejudice which seeks to define people as inferior, as not fully human, by virtue of their race.
They are engaged in struggle to end the practice which gave birth to these ideas, the practice of racial discrimination, racial oppression, domination and exploitation.
Racism, one of the great evils of our time, bedevils human relations, between individuals within and between nations and across continents. It brutalises entire peoples, destroys persons, warps the process of thought and injects into human society a foul air of tension, mutual antagonism and hatred. It demeans and dehumanises both victim and practitioner, locking them into the vile relationship of master race and untermenschen, superior and underling, each with his position defined by race.
As black South Africans, we have lived within the entrails of the racist beast for many a long year. We have seen constructed a system of social organisation based on the premise and the practice that those who are white are inherently superior and those who are black must, in their own interests, be the objects of policies decided exclusively and solely by the white people.
Quite clearly, this edifice required some pseudo-theoretical precepts to underpin it and give it the appearance of rationality. The theoreticians of racism in our country drew on the gross perversions of science which assumed their clearest forms during the second half of the last century in Europe and the United States. In these centers of imperialist power, there grew up theories that biology and social anthropology provided the basis to justify the notion that all black people carried with them both an innate and a cultural inferiority to the white, giving the latter the right and the duty of guardianship over the former.
Theoreticians of 'Racial Purity' Implicit in this thesis is the idea that these higher human beings have a similar right and duty to maintain the purity of the human species up to the point and including the commission of the crime of genocide.
One of the earliest of these racist theoreticians in our country, this century, was one other than General Jan Smuts, who opposed Nazism only because it threatened British imperial power. Speaking amidst the splendour of the London Savoy Hotel in 1917, Smuts had this to say: 'It has now become an accepted axiom in our dealings with the Natives that it is dishonourable to mix white and black blood... We have felt more and more that if we are to solve our Native question, it is useless to try to govern black and white in the same institutions of government and legislation. They are different not only in colour but in minds and in political capacity...'2 More than 40 years later, when these insulting racist ideas had been translated into the apartheid system, here is what two other theoreticians of this system wrote: 'The three foundation stones of apartheid are Western culture, Christian morality and a specific racial identity. In the case of the Afrikaner, there is a powerful connecting link between these three elements. His own particular biogenetic character is, for example, associated with a particular socio-cultural way of life and to give up either, through amalgamation with a more primitive culture or race, must necessarily result in the destruction of the other.'3 Of course the inanities that were being conveyed as biogenetic and socio-cultural theory, during the second halves of both the 19th and the 20th centuries, were nothing but an attempt to justify a colonial relationship of the domination and exploitation of the black peoples by the whites. They had absolutely nothing to do with scientific truth.
Once implanted, and despite their exposure as fraudulent and bankrupt, these ideas seemed to take on an independent existence, nurtured by the continued practice of white supremacy in many parts of the globe. Originating from practice, they served to encourage the entrenchment, perpetuation and extension of this practice. To emphasise the point that they reflected an immutable natural order of things, the fertile human mind goes further to enrobe these racist ideas and practices with the cloak of religion.
It is indeed in this way that it becomes possible for racism to give those who believe themselves to be superior, the power to challenge the very God they dragoon to serve their interests and whom they claim to worship. Thus, whereas the Christian scriptures, for instance, see all human beings as having been created in God's image, all racists will, for reasons that are perfectly obvious to them, retort that this cannot be so. And so it is that the foulest of crimes, against life itself, are perpetrated in the name of religion, as is the case in our own country. The idea of a civilising mission, so dear to the earlier missionaries, derived exactly from this view that the European was a higher being deposited on this planet to play God over 'the Natives'.
From what we have said so far, it is self-evident that the practical relationship that characterised the interaction between Europe and the colonised world, today's Third World, could not be but a hothouse of ideas for justifying this relationship. In its essence, racism is therefore about domination and works both to justify existing domination and to prescribe domination as the sine qua non for the solution of all future problems.
Among the objectives pursued by our illustrious host here today, the Third World Foundation, are 'to assist in the evolution of a fundamentally just and equitable relationship between the Third World and the developed countries' as well as 'to create greater awareness of the problems of poverty, hunger and ignorance in the Third World.'
Colonial Relations Persist That it is necessary to address these issues, as indeed it is, attests to the fact that the imbalance of strength, the inequality of power and the incompatibility of objectives that marked the relations between the imperialist Powers and the colonised peoples remain to this day. It is not necessary for us to elaborate further on this to those who are gathered here and have to contend with its disastrous consequences daily.
The point we must, however, emphasise is that it is exactly in these conditions that racism thrives, as it did during the colonial period. Hence we still find current, notions, that at the base of the 'North-South' dichotomy, lies the difference between white people in the North who are inventive industrious and disciplined and the blacks in the South who are innately indolent, imitative and happy-go-lucky.
Western Europe has large numbers of so-called gastarbeiter who are mainly non-European workers from the South. The jobs they do, the squalor in which many of them live, the ghettos in which they are concentrated, once more emphasise the distinction between black and white as well as the lowly position of the former and the superiority and domination of the latter.
Similarly, in the United States, one has only to see the statistics of unemployment, drug addiction, homelessness, single-parent families and so on, to realise the extent to which the black population is marginalised and serves as a living example for the most backward elements to 'prove' the assertion that to be black is to belong to a category of the human species that is less than human and which must be used as befits its status.
All of us present here know that the causes that account for the relationship between black and white, the North and the South, that we have been talking about, are neither biogenetic nor socio-cultural. Rather, they are socio-economic and are therefore capable of being changed or removed.
Those who are interested in an end to racism must necessarily be concerned that these organisations should succeed. Inasmuch as the huge nuclear arms expenditures are incompatible with development, so is the growing relative and absolute underdevelopment of millions upon millions of black people incompatible with the objective of ridding the world of racial arrogance, discrimination and tyranny.
The urgent need for a New International Economic Order has been dramatically illustrated by the famine in Africa, the international debt crisis and the collapse of the price of oil and other raw materials. The hard and continuing struggle for the New Order is fundamentally about the redistribution of the world means of production, to bring about the economic independence of the Third World and enable its peoples to banish hunger, disease and ignorance for ever, to assert their dignity as human beings and bring fulfilment to their lives. The accomplishment of this objective would itself redress the political imbalance which threatens the independence of many nations, thanks to the extension of the infamous Monroe Doctrine by the present United States Administration to cover the entire Third World.
We, the peoples who were objects of imperialist expansionism, for ever the infantile dwarfs who required the benign or brutal patronage of the white superperson, in earlier times had to be liberated form the state of noble savagery. Whether this resulted in our transportation across the seas as slaves or in enslavement in our own countries, as subject peoples, was but the unfolding of the manifest destiny.
Today, still the infantile dwarfs as of yore, unable to think for ourselves, inanimate fruit ready for the picking by whosoever has sufficient strength to rule the garden patch, we are being taken under the protective wing of the United States, to save us from falling victim to an alleged communist expansionism.
Angola and Mozambique, Nicaragua and Libya, Grenada, El Salvador, and Namibia are the victims of this eminently racist policy which asserts the supremacy of the interests of the United States over those of the peoples of the Third World, which presumes, as General Smuts put it, that we have neither the minds nor the political capacity to exercise the right to self-determination.
Concentrated Racism Apartheid in South Africa exists as the concentrated expression of the worldwide cancer of racism that we have been talking about. In our country, the ideas and practices of racism reign supreme, as they did in Nazi Germany - the essence and the purpose of State policy, the instrument to effect and guarantee the domination and exploitation of the black majority by the white minority.
Because of its high pedigree in reactionary political thought and praxis through the world, the apartheid system serves also as the nursery for the cultivation and propagation of the same man-hating policies which the United Nations Organisation was formed to stamp out. It is because there is today widespread recognition of this reality that there exists that important instrument of international law - the [International] Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.
We assert it as incontrovertible truth that mankind is under an obligation to suppress and punish this crime against humanity. On the basis of the experience of our own people of the horrendous practice of racism, we can categorically state it here that this crime cannot be suppressed by means of words or by persuading its perpetrators to desist from the commission of a crime.
Racism, the theory and practice of the domination of one race by another, and specifically its apartheid expression, cannot be reformed. Like Nazism, its antecedent and sister crime against humanity, it must be overthrown and uprooted forcibly, in its totality. Those who argue to the contrary and even claim that Pretoria has embarked on reform, are either grossly misled or are bent on protecting the regime or racial tyranny by seeking to refurbish its image to make it mere acceptable.
In any case, a cancer cannot be its own cure. The fanatical racists, who have spent more than half a century drawing up the blueprints of the apartheid system and transforming those theoretical constructions into the South African society we know today, cannot, at the same time, be the agents for the abolition of the system.
All they know and will ever know, is the need to maintain the system of white supremacy, and to maintain it by the use of all the violence that they can muster. Today our people are dying in large numbers, murdered on the orders of Pretoria's army and police generals. The bloodletting continues without reserve because, after all, those that are being killed are, in the eyes of the generals, lesser beings who can be disposed of without compunction, because they are less than human. Some Western Governments are pleased to describe this as the maintenance of law and order! The reality of the perpetuation of racism in South Africa is that the apartheid regime is supported by the same forces which, during the last century, deemed that the perspectives held out by the French and American revolutions were not for the colonised. The dominant forces in the major Western countries do this not despite the system of apartheid, but because of it.
They support racism because it expresses the imperative of the system they represent, namely, to dominate, and serves their purposes as an instrument for the extreme exploitation of those who are dominated. For these reasons, they spurn our appeals for comprehensive sanctions against apartheid South Africa, which we repeat today and urge upon the world community as the most effective means to bring about change in our country with the minimum of violence and destruction.
It was not a slip of the tongue but a frank admission of the truth when Ronald Reagan characterised the apartheid regime as an ally of long standing. His policy of constructive engagement with apartheid represents an engagement with racism that arises from the nature of imperialism - an engagement which, in the context of his goal to dominate the Third World, is constructive because it helps to strengthen the allied apartheid regime.
True to character, the Reagan Administration and others in the West make certain, whenever they address the question of negotiations to resolve the conflict in our country that they put the supposed interests and aspirations of the white minority first. They turn their own national experience of political change on their heads in order to serve the cause of racism in South Africa.
For example, it is argued forcefully that it is inappropriate and unreasonable for us to demand that all South Africans, both black and white, should have an equal right to elect the government of their choice - in other words, to have a system of one person one vote in a unitary State.
Similarly, it is argued that it is we, the victims of the violence inherent in the apartheid system, we who have to bury our murdered children every day, who must lay down arms and cease our armed struggle to make negotiations possible. Countries which are proud of the armed revolutions which brought their peoples democracy are, because of their support for the racists, equally fervent in their denunciation of our armed combatants as terrorists.
Likewise, we must renounce all claims to the national wealth of our country, which we have created with our labour, because, by some queer logic, to say that the wealth of the country must be shared by all the people is, in the South African context, to threaten the human rights of the white minority.
From Washington, London, Bonn and Paris issues the call that it will be absolutely vital to safeguard the rights of the white minority. And yet from all these, which pride themselves as the centers of democracy, there is never a word about the rights of the majority - the nonracial majority! Instead, these centers of democracy are engaged in a desperate bid to find flunkeys and collaborators from among the black people who will be imposed on us as our true representatives and paid for their services, in order to preserve white privilege.
But certainly, no amount of political maneuvering or killing of our people will blunt or stop the offensive of our masses, under the leadership of the African National Congress, to destroy racism in our country. Already the realisation is abroad among our people that victory is in sight.
It is a victory that we will use to build a truly democratic South Africa, one in which we shall abolish racism once and for all, and end the unjust and unequal relations of domination and exploitation that exist between black and white in our country today and which are expressed in the concept and the practice of apartheid.
By that means, we shall also make our contribution to the struggle for a just and equitable international political, economic and social order and add as much as we can to the construction of a new world, free from hunger and poverty and free from the threat of termination of life itself through the use of nuclear weapons in a Third World War.
We count ourselves fortunate that we have among our people such outstanding humanists as Nelson and Winnie Mandela, as well as others such as Albertina Sisulu, Greta Ncapai, Dorothy Nyembe, Thandi Modise, Frances Baard, Vesta Smith, Amanda Kwadi, Barbara Hogan and Marion Sparg, people who hate racism and love all humanity enough to be prepared to die in the defence of liberty of all persons, regardless of their colour or race.
We are proud that we come of a people that, like all others, is not prepared to tolerate evil and acquiesce in the perpetuation of tyranny. In their names, we are happy to receive this eminent prize. We thank the Third World Foundation and all who are associated with it for having so honoured us.
This prize will serve as a further spur for us and, we are certain, for the rest of humanity, to redouble our efforts to free all the political prisoners in our country and to liberate the millions of our people who are held hostage by a racist clique.
Oliver Tambo was the ANC's longest-serving President, from 1967 to 1991.
The South African Communist Party, in its 1984 constitution, declares that its aim is to lead the working class towards the strategic goal of establishing a socialist republic 'and the more immediate aim of winning the objectives of the national democratic revolution which is inseparably linked to it'. The constitution describes the main content of the national democratic revolution as '...the national liberation of the African people in particular, and the black people in general, the destruction of the economic and political power of the racist ruling class, and the establishment of one united state of people's power in which the working class will be the dominant force and which will move uninterruptedly towards social emancipation and the total abolition of exploitation of man by man'.
The national democratic revolution - the present stage of struggle in our country is a revolution of the whole oppressed people. This does not mean that the oppressed 'people' can be regarded as a single or homogeneous entity. The main revolutionary camp in the immediate struggle is made up of different classes and strata (overwhelmingly black), which suffer varying forms and degrees of national oppression and economic exploitation. The camp of those who benefit from, and support, national domination is also divided into classes.
Some 'learned theorists' are continuously warning workers against talk of a 'revolution of the whole oppressed people', accusing those who use such formulations of being 'populists' rather than revolutionaries. Let us hear Lenin on this question since he was also in the habit of using the same words to describe the upsurge in Russia: 'Yes, the people's revolution. Social Democracy ... demands that this word shall not be used to cover up failure to understand class antagonisms within the people ... However, it does not divide the 'people' into 'classes' so that the advanced class becomes locked up within itself ... the advanced class ... should fight with all the greater energy and enthusiasm for the cause of the whole people, at the head of the whole people' (Selected Works, Volume 1, p.503).
Of course, the long-term interests of the diverse classes and strata of the revolutionary camp do not necessarily coincide. They do not have the same consistency and commitment even to the immediate objectives of the democratic revolution. It is obviously from within the ranks of the black middle and upper strata that the enemy will look for sources of collaboration. We will return to this question.
But, in general, it remains true that our National Democratic Revolution expresses the broad objective interests not only of the working class but also of most of the other classes within the nationally-dominated majority, including the black petit- bourgeoisie and significant strata of the emergent black bourgeoisie. This reality provides the foundation for a struggle which aims to mobilise to its side all the oppressed classes and strata as participants in the national liberation alliance.
We believe that the working class is both an indispensable part and the leading force of such a liberation alliance. But its relations with other classes and strata cannot be conditional on the acceptance by them of socialist aims. The historic programme which has evolved to express the common immediate aspirations of all the classes of the oppressed people is the Freedom Charter. This document is not, in itself, a programme for socialism, even though (as we argue later) it can provide a basis for uninterrupted advance to a socialist future.
The recent surge in workers' organisation and socialist thinking has highlighted some important questions.
If we pose the question by asking only whether our struggle is a national struggle or a class struggle, we will inevitably get a wrong answer. The right question is: what is the relationship between these two categories. A failure to understand the class content of the national struggle and the national content of the class struggle in existing conditions can hold back the advance of both the democratic and socialist transformations which we seek.
The immediate primacy of the struggle against race tyranny flows from the concrete realities of our existing situation. The concept of national domination is not a mystification to divert us from class approaches; it infects every level of class exploitation. Indeed, it divides our working class into colour compartments. Therefore, unusual categories such as 'white working class' and 'black working class' are not 'unscientific' but simply describe the facts.
National domination is maintained by a ruling class whose state apparatus protects the economic interests and social privileges of all classes among the white minority. It denies the aspiration of the African people towards a single nationhood and, in its place, attempts to perpetuate tribalism and ethnicity. These, and a host of related practices, are the visible daily manifestations of national domination. These practices affect the status and life of every black in every class. It is, however, the black working class which, in practice, suffers the most intense form of national domination.
And those who dismiss the fight against national domination as the key immediate mobilising factor of our working class are living in an unreal world of their own.
Socialist ideas take root not just through book knowledge but through struggle around day-to-day issues. And, for those who have to live the hourly realities and humiliations of race tyranny (at the point of production, in the townships, in the street, etc.) there is no issue more immediate and relevant than the experience of national oppression. This is certainly the starting point of political consciousness for every black worker.
It is mainly in the actual struggle against national oppression that its class roots can be grasped most effectively. It is that struggle which illuminates most brightly the underlying relationship in our country between capitalism and national domination.
Those who would like to restrict the meaning of class struggle to a trade union struggle against the bosses, and who see political struggle only through narrow economistic spectacles, would do well to heed Lenin's words on these questions: 'Is it true that, in general, the economic struggle is 'the most widely applicable means' of drawing the masses in to political struggle? It is entirely untrue. Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less 'widely applicable' as a means of drawing in the masses... Of the sum total of cases in which the workers suffer (either on their own account or on account of those closely connected with them) from tyranny, violence and lack of rights, undoubtedly only a small minority represent cases of police tyranny in the trade union struggle as such' (Selected Works, Volume 1, p.136).
Class struggle in a period of capitalist hegemony is, in the long run, a political struggle for the ultimate winning of power by the working people.
But the content of this class struggle does not remain fixed for all time; it is dictated by the concrete situation at a given historical moment. We cannot confine the meaning of class struggle to those rare moments when the immediate winning of socialist power is on the agenda. When workers engage in the national struggle to destroy race domination they are surely, at the same time, engaging in class struggle.
Class struggle does not fade into the background when workers forge alliances with other class forces on commonly agreed minimum programmes. The history of all struggles consists mainly of such interim phases. What is the essence of conflict during such phases if not class struggle? There is no such thing as 'pure' class struggle and those who seek it can only do so from the isolating comfort of a library arm-chair. The idea that social revolutions involve two neatly-labelled armies was dealt with by Lenin with bitter irony: 'So one army lines up in one place and says 'we are for socialism' and another, somewhere else and says, 'we are for imperialism', and that will be a social revolution! ... Whoever expects a 'pure' social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is'. (Collected Works, Volume 22, pp.355-6).
The workers in Vietnam were not abandoning the class struggle when they concentrated their main energies, in alliance with other class forces, on defeating Japanese militarist occupation, French colonialism, and finally US imperialism and its puppet forces. When Hitler unleashed world war, the main content of the workers' class struggle correctly became the defeat of fascism. This task necessitated the most 'popular' of Fronts which brought together both pro- and anti-socialist forces. It is a matter of historical record that the anti-fascist victory made possible, among other things, the greatest extension of the socialist world since the October Revolution and opened the road to successful anti-imperialist, anti-colonial revolutions.
When we exhort our working class to devote its main energies (in alliance with the other nationally oppressed classes) to the immediate task of winning national liberation, we are certainly not diluting the class struggle or retreating from it. On the contrary, we are advancing and reinforcing it in the only manner which is practicable at the present time.
Nor are we putting off the socialist revolution by an emphasis on the National Democratic objectives of the immediate phase of struggle. In the words of Lenin, answering critics of Bolshevik policy on the primacy of the democratic revolution, 'we are not putting (the socialist revolution) off but are taking the first steps towards it in the only possible way, along with the correct path, namely the path of a democratic republic' (Selected Works, Volume 1, p.435). Our immediate emphasis on the struggle for democracy and 'People's Power' is an essential prerequisite for the longer-term advance towards a socialist transformation.
But national liberation is, at the same time, a short-term class imperative for the working people. Because the tyranny of national oppression weighs more heavily on South Africa's doubly- exploited working class than on any other working class, its destruction by the shortest route possible is, in itself, in the deepest class interests of our proletariat. Both immediately and in the long-term, our working class stands to gain more from the ending of national domination than any other class among the oppressed.
These realities help define the main form and content of the workers' class struggle at the present historical moment and the kind of alliances necessary to advance working class objectives. A 'class struggle' which ignores these truths can only be fought out in the lecture-room and not in the actual arena of struggle.
But the need to concentrate on the present does not imply an abandonment or disregard for the future. We shall argue more fully in a later section that participation by the working class in the democratic revolution (involving alliances, minimum programmes, etc.) does not imply a dilution of its independent class positions.
There is, moreover, no need for the spread of socialist awareness among the working people to be postponed during the phase emphasising the democratic transformation a belief falsely attributed to our Party by some of its left-wing critics. During this period it is vital to maintain and deepen working class understanding of the interdependence between national liberation and social emancipation. This task cannot be postponed until the ANC flag flies over Pretoria.
It follows from the above that the participation of our working class and its political vanguard in the liberation alliance is both a long-term and short-term class necessity. The SACP's involvement in such an alliance is not, as our left-wing critics allege, a form of 'tailism' or 'populism'.
Nor, as our right-wing detractors would have it, is it an opportunistic ploy to camouflage our so-called 'hidden agenda' and to use the ANC merely as a stepping stone to socialism.
We have never made a secret of our belief that the shortest route to socialism is via a democratic state. But, as already mentioned, the SACP takes part in the alliance for yet another extremely cogent reason; our belief that the elimination of national domination (which is the prime objective of the Alliance) is, at the same time, the most immediate class concern of our proletariat.
Joe Slovo was General Secretary of the South African Communist Party from 1984 to 1991, and served as its Chairperson from 1991 to his death in 1995.
On an occasion such as this, we should, perhaps, start from the beginning.
So, let me begin. I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope. The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld.
The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day. At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.
A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say - I am an African! I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape - they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result. Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me. In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.
I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.
My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.
I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind's eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins. I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns.
I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence. Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that - I am an African.
I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle, the one redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the indefensible. I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image. I know what it signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who, sub-human.
I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the consequent striving to be what one is not, simply to acquire some of the benefits which those who had improved themselves as masters had ensured that they enjoy. I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest. I have seen the corruption of minds and souls as a result of the pursuit of an ignoble effort to perpetrate a veritable crime against humanity.
I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings. There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality - the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to steal to assuage hunger, those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain. Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage. To these the extent of death is directly proportional to their personal welfare. And so, like pawns in the service of demented souls, they kill in furtherance of the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal. They murder the innocent in the taxi wars.
They kill slowly or quickly in order to make profits from the illegal trade in narcotics. They are available for hire when husband wants to murder wife and wife, husband. Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past - killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have absolute disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in their quest for self-enrichment. All this I know and know to be true because I am an African! Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines. I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression. I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation of injustice. The great masses who are our mother and father will not permit that the behaviour of the few results in the description of our country and people as barbaric.
Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad. Nor do they turn triumphalist when, tomorrow, the sun shines. Whatever the circumstances they have lived through and because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be. We are assembled here today to mark their victory in acquiring and exercising their right to formulate their own definition of what it means to be African.
The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes an unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender of historical origins. It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as Africans, and will defend to the death, that the people shall govern.
It recognises the fact that the dignity of the individual is both an objective which society must pursue, and is a goal which cannot be separated from the material well-being of that individual. It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the fear of tyranny.
It aims to open the doors so that those who were disadvantaged can assume their place in society as equals with their fellow human beings without regard to colour, race, gender, age or geographic dispersal. It provides the opportunity to enable each one and all to state their views, promote them, strive for their implementation in the process of governance without fear that a contrary view will be met with repression. It creates a law-governed society which shall be inimical to arbitrary rule. It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means rather than resort to force. It rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the space for all of us voluntarily to define ourselves as one people.
As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud, proud without reservation and proud without any feeling of conceit. Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the fact that this magnificent product is the unique creation of African hands and African minds. But it is also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind, to define for ourselves what we want to be.
Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, petulance, selfishness and short-sightedness. But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda - Glory must be sought after! Today it feels good to be an African.
It feels good that I can stand here as a South African and as a foot soldier of a titanic African army, the African National Congress, to say to all the parties represented here, to the millions who made an input into the processes we are concluding, to our outstanding compatriots who have presided over the birth of our founding document, to the negotiators who pitted their wits one against the other, to the unseen stars who shone unseen as the management and administration of the Constitutional Assembly, the advisers, experts and publicists, to the mass communication media, to our friends across the globe - congratulations and well done! I am an African. I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa. The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi and Algeria is a pain I also bear. The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share. The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair.
This is a savage road to which nobody should be condemned. This thing that we have done today, in this small corner of a great continent that has contributed so decisively to the evolution of humanity says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from the ashes.
Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now! Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace! However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper! Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage from our past, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err today and say - nothing can stop us now!