Comrade Chair,
Comrade Leader of the ANC Women's Section
Members of the National Executive Committee of the ANC,
Members of the Secretariat of the Women's Section,
Comrades,
Allow me to begin by expressing on behalf of the National Executive Committee our very deep appreciation of the work done by the outgoing leadership of the Women's Section. We know it was a long and lonely struggle to keep the Women's Section alive in the first instance and to build it to the force that it is today.
Secondly, we equally want to express our appreciation of the choice you have made in electing the new leadership. We congratulate especially Comrade Gertrude, senior, experienced and mature leader of our people, on her appointment to an office in the movement that is going to be increasingly challenging. We wish her and her Secretariat every success; we assure her that, as the National Executive Committee, we shall support her to the best of our ability.
Comrades,
The meeting of the Women's Section which commenced on September 10, 1981, with an opening address by Comrade President Sam Nujoma, President of SWAPO of Namibia, has now completed its business. I believe it is the general consensus among all the participants that a fair and objective assessment of the meeting would be best conveyed by two words only: supremely successful. This would be a reference to the businesslike manner in which the proceedings were conducted; the serious atmosphere in which discussions were held; the fierce concentration with which speakers addressed the topics presented for discussion; the prevalence among the participants, individually and collectively, of a sense of mission inspired by a constant awareness of the national and international challenges posed for the women of South Africa, and the ANC women in particular, in this decade of the eighties, the Decade of Destiny. To have held a successful conference is to have put substance into our verbal expressions of gratitude to the MPLA Party of Labour, the Government and people of Angola, and especially to the Organisation of Angolan Women (OMA), who made the meeting possible in the first instance.
To have held a successful conference is to have vindicated the confidence and trust which the international community has in the ANC and its Women's Section - confidence and trust reflected in the generous financial and other material donations without which the meeting could have remained a remote dream.
To have held a successful conference at this critical moment in the southern African situation is to have focussed the attention of everyone in South Africa on the presence in Angola, in this very month of September, of two types of South Africa: the one type concentrated in the south of Angola, the other assembled in Luanda - the question being: Which of these two is the true South Africa? Which one represents those forces which the people of South Africa must and will destroy and annihilate. Is it that unsightly army of marauding murderers in southern Angola, or is it the glorious band of ANC women in Luanda?
On the other hand women in the ANC should stop behaving as if there was no place for them above the level of certain categories of involvement. They have a duty to liberate us men from antique concepts and attitudes about the place and role of women in society and in the development and direction of our revolutionary struggle. In fear of being a failure, Comrade Lindiwe Mabuza cried, sobbed and ultimately collapsed on top of herself when she learnt she had been appointed ANC Chief Representative to the Scandinavian countries. But, looking at the record, could any man have done better or even as well?
The oppressor has, at best, a lesser duty to liberate the oppressed than the oppressed himself. The struggle to conquer oppression in our country is the weaker for the traditionalist, conservative and primitive restraints imposed on women by man-dominated structures within our movement, as also because of equally traditionalist attitudes of surrender and submission on the part of women.
We need to move from revolutionary declarations to revolutionary practice. We invite the ANC Women's Section, and the black women of South Africa, more oppressed and more exploited than any section of the population, to take up this challenge and assume their proper role, outside the kitchen among the fighting ranks of our movement and at its command posts.
The Women's Section is not an end in itself. It is a weapon of struggle, to be correctly used, against all forms and levels of oppression and inequality in the interests of a victorious struggle of the people.
Comrade Chair and Comrades,
If I have perchance overstated the case for a more balanced distribution of tasks and responsibilities within our movement, it remains true that the burden that women carry is seldom recognised. Their silent fortitude as they toil under the weight of manmade hardships often passes unnoticed and unsung.
Comrades,
Every passing day brings confirmation of the fact that while racist minority rule persists in our country, its violence cannot be contained within the borders of that country, or confined to any single country outside those borders. While continuing to occupy Namibia and Angolan territory, the regime has now sent its fascist troops to invade Zambia. It will be another country next time. In due course, it will be all the countries of this region, and then all Africa from Cape to Cairo.
The burden of the South African fascist regime on the young independent African nations of this region is growing. The regime has embarked on a campaign of provocation and destabilisation. It is looking for war, using our country as its base, and our slave labour as its logistics.
Which one represents South Africa as an accepted member of the African, the Non-Aligned and the international community? Is it the armed thugs in southern Angola or the ANC women fighters for world peace and progress?
Which one represents man as having travelled the least possible distance from the mediaeval ape, which killed and murdered with insatiable relish? Is it those in Luanda who are discussing the role of women in the development of human society and the upbringing of children, or is it those in southern Angola who are savagely bombing women and children, destroying houses, towns, bridges?
To have had a successful conference in this country at this moment in its era of independence is, therefore, to have reaffirmed that our cause is a just cause, it is the cause of all progressive mankind. It shall prevail. On the other hand the racists have no cause, no future, and no place except perhaps among the ghosts of dead empires.
To have held a successful conference now is to have paid a worthy tribute to 25 years of heroic struggle by the women of South Africa.
But in assessing this conference as a great success we are making a preliminary judgment; we are talking about the immediate past rather than the future. It is the testing period ahead, it is the rugged and boggy terrain of implementation now opening up before us, which will decide the correct place of this conference in the history of our struggle.
The decisions of this conference, to be endorsed by the National Executive Committee of the ANC, bear upon our entire struggle and their implementation is a task confronting all the cadres of the movement at all levels and all centres.
Perhaps it is necessary here to address the all-important question of the position of women in our movement.
The mobilisation of women is the task, not only of women alone, or of men alone, but of all of us, men and women alike, comrades in struggle. The mobilisation of the people into active resistance and struggle for liberation demands the energies of women no less than of men. A system based on the exploitation of man by man can in no way avoid the exploitation of women by the male members of society. There is therefore no way in which women in general can liberate themselves without fighting to the end the exploitation of man by man, both as a concept and as a social system.
Having said this, we need to recognise that the capacity of the women to contribute fully in the liberation struggle depends, in part, on what we in practice conceive to be their role as women.
If we are to engage our full potential in the pursuit of the goals of our revolutionary struggle, then, as revolutionaries, we should stop pretending that the women in our movement have the same opportunities as men. There is little evidence of it, if the high calibre of the women meeting here today is anything to go by. For this has been a meeting of women who are worthy of Lilian Ngoyi and her great impact on our whole struggle.
Far from the racist regime being subjected to a so-called communist onslaught, it is the peace-seeking nations of southern Africa who are the targets of a total terrorist onslaught by a minority which came to Africa as foreigners some 300 years ago, and which, by its conduct, is as foreign to Africa today as it was then. These racists murdered, pillaged and plundered their way from the Cape to Angola then; they are murdering, pillaging and plundering their way northward still. Colonial domination from Cape to Cairo was their dream then, they have been testing nuclear bombs, evidently in pursuit of the same dream.
And if for Africa it is business as usual while this regime is liquidating Namibians and Angolans, invading Angola and staying for the duration of its pleasure on Angolan territory; if Africa's optimum response is a condemnatory resolution as one country after another is occupied, can it take very long before the fascists cross the equator?
There is another dimension to this possibility. Reagan's United States, Begin's Israel and Racist South Africa (RSA) form a war-waging triangle with its apex in Washington and its base running across Africa from Cape to Cairo and beyond to the capital of Israel. There is no weapon the United States Administration will not deliver to Israel or help Israel produce. For the Reagan Administration, RSA is fast becoming the Israel of southern Africa, equally deserving of military aid. Africa falls within this war triangle - Africa, the continent of the future, the richest in untapped mineral resources. Quite clearly, imperialism is planning ahead as well as looking ahead.
In that event, the piercing screams emanating from Pretoria about a communist onslaught, and the deafening and senseless noise about Cuban soldiers in Angola and a Soviet presence in southern Africa, are all a cover for the most sinister designs against Africa. In this connection, the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel and RSA, which both deny - naturally - and the certainty of both being supplied with the neutron bomb, should not be treated lightly.
Relevant to these designs is the fact that the South African regime, by invoking such slogans as "communist onslaught" and "international terrorism", and by committing provocative aggression against southern African States, is desperately trying to internationalise the struggle for national liberation and transform it into a West-East global war, precisely to create the situation which would justify the re-conquest of Africa, as well as ensure the survival of the regime itself.
As a liberation movement we cannot presume to tell independent Africa what to do. But as part of Africa, as a fighting force based at the headquarters of the worst enemy of Africa, as a people and a movement committed to the total liberation and independence of Africa, as fighters for a new world order and for peace, we dare not close our minds to anything that bears upon the realities of the world in which we live and fight. That is why we heartily welcome the decision of the recent Lagos Summit of Frontline States to recommend the introduction of troops from African countries in the war against the South African invaders.
Our struggle is, therefore, both local, regional, continental and global. It is against this background that we must see the glorious challenge we face, the ennobling task assigned by history to the people of South Africa, to the women of our country, to her youth and to her workers: We are called upon to save Africa, to defend her independence, and contribute towards world peace by seizing power in our country. We have the capacity; if we do not, let us develop it. We have the strategies; if they are wrong, let us correct them.
In our opposition to the regime whose preoccupation is the domination of black peoples everywhere, we are a united majority in South Africa comprising not only the oppressed and exploited masses, but also people from every racial group. These include that brave brigade of women known as the "Black Sash" - veteran fighters for justice and peace; they include thousands of white youth and students who are convinced that the regime is digging a mass grave for their future; they include a growing number of white democrats, true patriots of our land; they include white members and leaders of the religious community, who have come to appreciate the essential justice of the cause we fight for.
In our determination to liberate our country and ourselves, we shall be deterred by nothing - least of all by the prospect of death. In our struggle as a detachment of the world anti-imperialist forces, we shall disappoint no one.
We have the manpower, for we are not alone. "We are 35 million", declared President Samora Machel of the People's Republic of Mozambique. We are even more than 35 million; we are hundreds of millions. We have our friends and supporters - the countries of Western Europe such as Sweden and other Nordic countries, Holland, France and Italy who support our cause, the peoples of Europe, including the churches, who are isolating racist South Africa in support of our struggle. The potential for support of the ANC in Europe is tremendous. The Socialist countries will always be with us.
In Canada, support for the ANC has reached new levels. The people of the United States, particularly the blacks, are becoming a powerful lobby for the struggle against racism and resent the role of the United States Administration in southern Africa. The people of New Zealand have emerged as ferocious opponents of the apartheid system and great allies of Africa and the liberation forces in South Africa. Six hundred and sixty million people in India stand firmly in support of the struggle led by the ANC. The world community as a whole is on our side.
We acknowledge this support today as we have done in the past. And we know that while, without it, we would have made little progress in our struggle, unless we register progress we shall be without much of it. For, what is being supported is a struggle, not a state of being or a status quo. That is the reason why we do not expect the OAU to support the ANC merely to keep it alive. It is also the reason why we should be surprised if the OAU found no cause to give encouraging material assistance to the obviously escalating struggle led by the ANC in South Africa.
Comrades, on December 16th, three months hence, we shall be commemorating the 20th anniversary of Umkhonto we Sizwe, and three weeks later, the 70th anniversary of the ANC. The run-up to these two uniquely historic events will be marked by intensive activity at home and abroad.
On behalf of the National Executive Committee of the ANC and of our Military Command, we call on all our people in South Africa to prepare to observe these occasions in a manner and on a scale worthy of our long history of struggle and of the countless martyrs and heroes who surrendered their lives, limbs and liberties in the cause of our liberation and in the cause of a united, nonracial and just society in our country.
We call on the brotherly peoples of southern Africa and all Africa, as well as friends of our struggle the world over, to join the ANC and the people of South Africa in observing these anniversaries. In the name of the Conference of the ANC Women's Section held in Luanda, we invite the women of Africa and of the rest of the world to share with the women of South Africa the burden of 70 years of struggle and the prospects of an impending victory.
Once again, and on behalf of the African National Congress and the ANC Women's Section, on behalf of all our people, including our leaders and colleagues on Robben Island, Pretoria Central Jail and other prisons, on behalf of our workers and youth; and on behalf of Umkhonto we Sizwe, we thank Comrade President Jose Eduardo dos Santos and the Central Committee of MPLA-Party of Labour, the Government and people of Angola, including, and in particular the Organisation of Angolan Women, for all the support they have given and continue to give our struggle.
We express our people's solidarity with the people of Angola, Zambia and other southern African States.
We stand firmly and solidly with our comrades-in-arms, SWAPO of Namibia. Our conviction in the certainty of their victory is unshakeable.
We salute all peoples all over the world fighting against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and against all other crimes perpetrated in the name of imperialism.
A Luta Continua!