Today, as Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela moves around the restricted confines of his prison cell on Robben Island, his mind is tuned in to the proceedings in Delhi. He shares this preoccupation not only with his beloved wife, Winnie Mandela, herself the subject of heartless restrictions and bans, but also with Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, James April, Toivo ja Toivo and other national leaders and fighters for liberation, for democracy and justice - fellow inmates of the notorious Robben Island prison. The thoughts of the entire membership of the ANC and of its allies and friends converge today on Delhi. The vast majority of the people of South Africa, from all walks of life and all strata and race origins - the young, no less than the old, regard this day in New Delhi as a national occasion for them.
It is, therefore, my pleasant duty, on behalf of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress, to express the deep appreciation and gratitude of all the national leaders and patriots incarcerated in the prisons of apartheid, all the members, allies and friends of the ANC and the great masses of the people engaged in the liberation struggle of our country, for the great honour bestowed on Nelson Mandela in nominating him for the 1979 Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding.
It is equally and especially my pleasant duty, although a much more onerous one, to convey to Your Excellency, Mr. President, to the Prime Minister and to your Government and people, the heartfelt thanks of our colleague, brother and comrade, Nelson Mandela.
He received the news of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award with a mixture of disbelief, surprise, profound gratitude and excitement. But the excitement quickly mellowed into a deep sense of humility. For, he understands the full meaning of the Award, its enormous significance and its challenging implications for him and his people.
He understands, because he knows Pandit Nehru's imposing stature as a world statesman; he knows his revered place in the hearts, minds and lives of the 650 million people of India; he knows, too, the esteem and deep respect Pandit Nehru enjoyed among the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Nelson Mandela, therefore, accepts the Award with full awareness of its historic message. He accepts it as a supreme challenge to him personally and to the leadership of the ANC and the people of South Africa of all races. He accepts it as an honour less for him than for the people of Africa.
We, of the African National Congress, wish to pay special tribute to the penetrating vision of the jury of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding. The recipient, Nelson Mandela,is beyond the reach of society. For more than 18 years, he has travelled and appeared nowhere, his voice has remained unheard and his views unexpressed. In that time, momentous world events have occurred sufficient to put into complete oblivion any one not involved in the main current of developments. We mention a few of these developments, limiting ourselves to Africa only.
A long-cherished dream of the ANC came true with the formation of the OAU in 1963. The continent has torn asunder almost every chain of colonial bondage and joined the world community of nations as a full and equal member, contributing with great effect to the solution of international problems. Southern Africa has undergone geopolitical transformations and social upheavals in the course of which colonial foundations, some of them laid 500 years ago, have been reduced to a heap of ruins. New names have appeared on the international scene and now stand out as great landmarks defining the geopolitical landscape of southern Africa: Samora Machel, Kenneth Kaunda, Agostinho Neto, Seretse Khama, Julius Nyerere, Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe and Sam Nujoma. The South African Defence Force, mighty in its arms and proud of its record, has had the traumatic experience of being defeated for the first time in its history by the armed forces of a newly independent State, and barely three months later, the same army was unleashing its might upon small children who confronted its bullets with only dustbin-lids and stones in Soweto. South Africa has suffered the staggering "Information Scandal", which climaxed in the fall of Vorster and Van den Bergh, of whom it could be said: No two South Africans have been more faithful to Hitler and his ways and none more identified with the naked inhumanity of the apartheid system.
Their place has been taken by P. W. Botha and Piet Koornhof, who, fighting no less relentlessly for the permanence of white minority rule in South Africa, have given fresh impetus to the dynamics of revolutionary change by their remarkable and disastrous failure to distinguish between the forgotten era of J. C. Smuts and Jan Hofmeyr - when the African giant was still lying prostrate, in chains - and the present hour, when the people's demand for power enjoys universal support and can no longer be compromised.
For, the question in South Africa today is no longer what amendments should be made to the law, but who makes the law and the amendments. Is it the people of South Africa as a whole or a white minority group with not even a democratic mandate from the majority of the people? An organ like the so-called Presidential Council is wholly objectionable not because Africans are excluded from it, but because it is a studied insult to the black people. It represents a policy decision for, and not by, the majority of South Africans. If this is the practice today, it was the practice in 1910 and since. But today, the people of South Africa are challenging the very constitutional foundations of the Republic of South Africa. Hence, the struggle for the seizure of power.
The stormy succession of tumultuous events of the kind we have mentioned were sufficient to drive Nelson Mandela and his Robben Island colleagues out of our minds. Yet, he and the other jailed national leaders have a presence in the consciousness of our people and of the world public so powerful that it cannot be explained except in terms of the indestructibility of the cause to which they have surrendered their liberty and offered their lives - the cause of the oppressed majority in South Africa, the cause of Africa, the cause of progressive mankind.
The unique significance of the 1979 Jawaharlal Nehru Award is that, displaying a delicate sensitivity to this enduring presence, it has identified in Nelson Mandela the indomitable spirit of a people, the supreme justice of their cause and their resolute determination to win final victory. In our humble opinion, the jury of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding could have made no better choice among the people of South Africa for such an honour at this time. For, if the immediate reaction of racist Prime Minister P.W. Botha to the victory of the Patriotic Front Alliance in Zimbabwe was to invite the people of South Africa to a multiracial conference to discuss the future of that country, the oppressed millions, supported by white democrats, responded by demanding the release of Nelson Mandela from imprisonment. The fact that P.W. Botha was evidently only trying to diffuse an explosive situation in South Africa subtracts nothing from the centrality of Nelson Mandela's past, present and future role in the struggle to unite the people of South Africa as fellow citizens in a democratic, nonracial and peaceful country. His entire political life has been guided by the vision of a democratic South Africa, its people united across the barriers of race, colour and religion, and contributing as a single nation to the pursuit of international peace and progress. For this reason, he knows no distinction between the struggle and his life.
Having chosen the law, as the avenue through which he could best serve his people, he soon found that the legal system of apartheid was itself an instrument of oppression. His conscience dictated that he place the quest for justice above the administration of unjust laws. This concern for justice led him into politics, into the leadership of the African National Congress, and ultimately to Robben Island - and even more politics.
It is opportune to recall, and Nelson Mandela`s captors may wish to ponder the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru, who was no stranger to imprisonment and was in no way destroyed by it, served the world community, including the British, far better as a free man than as a political prisoner. Nelson Mandela's 18 years' imprisonment has in no way destroyed him, and will not. Indeed a striking feature of political imprisonment in South Africa is that the morale of the prisoners remains intact notwithstanding the harsh brutality of the prison conditions and the long duration of the prison sentences.
The demand for the release of Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners is worldwide and is made more in the interests of all South Africans than out of any sense of unwanted pity for those imprisoned. But, overwhelmed by their iniquitous past and present, and lacking in true courage, the self-appointed rulers of our country fear the future: they are frightened of democracy, scared of social progress and suspicious of peace. That is why Nelson Mandela and some of the best known of our leaders remain in prison.
That is why it seems inevitable that the road to our liberation will be vastly different from yours, Mr. President. When India celebrated 25 years of independence, you observed, in your publication, India 1973, that "twenty-five years ago... the British transferred power to the rightful rulers of the country, the people of India. The event was unique for at least one reason: the transfer of power was effected not as a consequence of a clash of arms, but as the culmination of a nonviolent revolution led by Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest apostle of peace and nonviolence in modern times."
The revolution in South Africa has already lost its nonviolent character. Twenty-five years ago this year, in the course of a powerful nonviolent struggle led by one of the greatest leaders in South African history, Chief A.J. Luthuli, late President-General of the ANC and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1960, the people of South Africa adopted the Freedom Charter - a blueprint for democracy, progress and peace, which has itself gained international recognition as the key to a happy and peaceful future for South Africa.
But a mere six years after the adoption of the Freedom Charter, the oppressed people of South Africa were compelled to choose between violence and cowardice, to decide whether to fight or to surrender. They rejected cowardice. They refused to surrender. They took up arms. Africa and the world community approved and endorsed their decision.
Unlike India, therefore, South Africa holds out no conceivable prospect for a peaceful transfer of power to the people of South Africa. And yet, there is a golden thread that has linked the people of India and South Africa over the centuries.
Jan van Riebeeck, of the Dutch East India Company, was on a voyage to the seaports of India and the Far East when, in 1652, he stopped in South Africa and there planted a problem, which the United Nations has been debating since its foundation and which the United Nations General Assembly is discussing this very week.
It is fitting that on this day, I should recall the long and glorious struggle of those South Africans who came to our shores from India 120 years ago. Within two years of entering the bondage of indentured labour, Indian workers staged their first strike against the working conditions in Natal. This was probably the first general strike in South African history. Their descendants, working and fighting for the future of their country, South Africa, have retained the tradition of militant struggle and are today an integral part of the mass-based liberation movement in South Africa.
But the striking role of India in the development of the struggle for national and social liberation in South Africa has its firm roots in the early campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi in that country, coupled with the continuing and active interest he took in the South African situation. All South Africans have particular cause to honour and remember the man, who was in our midst for 21 years and went on to enter the history books as the Father of Free India. His imprint on the course of the South African struggle is indelible.
In the 1940s, in South Africa and India, our people voiced the same sentiments; to wage a war in the name of freedom and democracy, they said, was a hollow mockery as long as the colonial peoples were not free. We applauded the "Quit India" demand against the British, for, as the Congress resolution in August, 1942, so correctly said: "India... the classic land of modern imperialism, has become the crux of the question, for by the freedom of India will Britain and the United Nations be judged, and the peoples of Asia and Africa be filled with hope and enthusiasm." And so we were filled with hope and enthusiasm as we watched events unfold in India.
If Mahatma Gandhi started and fought his heroic struggle in South Africa and India, Jawaharlal Nehru was to continue it in Asia, Africa and internationally. In 1946, India broke trade relations with South Africa - the first country to do so. In the same year, at the First Session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Indian Government sharply raised the question of racial discrimination in South Africa - again the first country to take this action.
Speaking at the Bandung Conference in April 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru declared: "There is nothing more terrible than the infinite tragedy of Africa in the past few hundred years."
Referring to "the days when millions of Africans were carried away as galley slaves to America and elsewhere, half of them dying in the galleys," he urged: "we must accept responsibility for it, all of us, even though we ourselves were not directly involved."
He continued: "But unfortunately, in a different sense, even now the tragedy of Africa is greater than that of any other continent, whether it is racial or political. It is up to Asia to help Africa to the best of her ability because we are sister continents."
To her great honour, India has consistently lived up to this historic declaration, which constitutes one of the cornerstones of the Non-Aligned Movement. The tragedy of Africa, in racial and political terms, is now concentrated in the southern tip of the continent - in South Africa, Namibia, and in a special sense, Robben Island.
Quite clearly we have all come a long way from 1955. Jawaharlal Nehru's clarion call has already translated itself into a lasting partnership of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, who have joined hands with the Socialist community of nations, the progressive forces of the world and the national liberation movement, in an anti-imperialist front to eradicate the last vestiges of colonial domination and racism in Africa and elsewhere, to end fascism and exploitation, and to promote a new world economic order that will ensure true democracy, social progress and peace.
Nelson Mandela, who gained political maturity in the company of such household names in South Africa as A.J. Luthuli, Moses Kotane, Yusuf Dadoo, J.B. Marks, Elias Moretsele, Z.K. Matthews, Monty Naicker, Walter Sisulu, Lillian Ngoyi, Bram Fischer, Govan Mbeki, Helen Joseph and many others, has been confirmed by the Jawaharlal Nehru Award as a leader of men, ranking among the great international leaders of modern times. In their struggle for the seizure of power, the people of South Africa - its youth, workers, women, intelligentsia and peasants, led by the African National Congress and its allies, will not betray this great honour to our country. Nelson Mandela, with the rest of the leadership of the ANC, will remain worthy of the great Jawaharlal Nehru, today, tomorrow, ever.
The struggle to rid South Africa of racism, apartheid and colonial domination continues and victory for the world anti-imperialist forces is certain.