Interview with President O.R. Tambo on the current situation in South Africa and Southern Africa in General Mayibuye Number 10 & 11. 1984
Question: At the end of August the apartheid regime conducted its elections to the Coloured and Indian parliaments. The whole exercise turned out to be a farce, rejected by the majority of these communities and by the rest of the oppressed and democratic forces. How do you view the role of the ANC in bringing about this victory?
Tambo: The vanguard movement is on alert all the time, watching and following the manoeuvre of the enemy. We lost no time in alerting our people on what was happening with the President's Council and all those schemes. We called for action to resist all this. We called for mobilisation of our entire forces. We called for united action, 1982 and 1983. It was necessary that we should meet this new offensive by the enemy as a united democratic force. Nothing else would help.
I think our people responded remarkably to this call. The emergence of the UDF was exactly what we were talking about during the year of Unity in Action, 1982. It was what we envisaged in our call in 1983 for United Action. We had called for confrontation with the enemy on all fronts, by all our people in their various organisational formations. The response to this call was the emergence of the UDF.
Early this year, facing the prospect of 'elections' in August, we called on our people to boycott those polling booths, to stand firmly united as an opposition to the oppressive system of apartheid. We called on the youth, the women, the workers, our young armed cadres to rise and face this bold attempt by the enemy to dig in. And there was a response, a remarkable response to this.
Question: In response, the regime has not only unleashed its police but has also called in the army in an attempt to suppress the mounting township revolt. It has also taken a number of measurers to paralyse the UDF and the rest of the legal democratic movement. The regime says one of the reasons why it is taking action against the UDF leadership is that the UDF is a front of the ANC. Now if we say that the emergence of the UDF and present day mass upsurge is a result of organisation and mobilisation by the ANC, does it follow that the UDF is a creation of the ANC?
Tambo: NO! NO! It does not follow, because the ANC has for a long time now, even since it was banned, actually called on the people to organise themselves: any organisation, even where it differed with the ANC, provided only it was oriented against the apartheid system, we supported it. So we have encouraged the formation of organisations. These 700 organisations that belong to the UDF were not created by the ANC. But the ANC has called on the people to organise themselves, whether they organise themselves into ping-pong clubs or whatever it is, but we said, organise and direct your attention and activity to freeing yourselves so that you become human beings and citizens of your own country, which you are not!
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