Mr. Chairman,
Brothers and Sisters,
Comrades,
May I say how very important this meeting is in the context of the developments in southern Africa. The emergence of the Reagan Administration had heightened the feeling on our part that we need to discuss this new problem with the people of the United States, and in particular with black leaders in the United States, because there is so much that is racist in the new policies and we could not but feel that racism is not shared by the majority of the people of this country, certainly not by those who have been the victims of racism themselves in this country. These new policies have given rise to a whole crisis in Africa and part of Africa is on this continent.
This meeting is particularly welcome also because this month of June, as our Comrade Garoeb(2) has said, is also witnessing a series of meetings in Africa by the various organs of the Organisation of African Unity. As we meet here today, there is a similar meeting of the Liberation Committee which is preparing for the meeting next week of the Ministerial Council of the OAU, to be followed by the Summit. We should like to feel that we are part of that series of meetings, with the special feature that this is a meeting of representatives of Africa and of the United States. And so we would like to express our very sincere thanks to Transafrica and other organisations cooperating in convening this meeting, as well as individuals who have made it possible.
In Paris, some two weeks ago, at a Conference referred to by Ambassador Clark,(3)
I picked up a message from President Sam Nujoma who was at that meeting. We were discussing this meeting together. He was saying he had been invited - and he had been most keen to come and appreciated the timeliness of this meeting and its significance at this time - but that unfortunately for him, he had an appointment running over a whole week to address rallies in Zimbabwe and he felt he could not quite miss that opportunity. But he asked me to convey his greetings - greetings of SWAPO - ably represented here of course, by its Administrative Secretary - and his hope that this meeting would prove historic.
Today, the Reagan Administration sees an imperial role for the United States. It visualises a world structured and governed in a way by Washington to serve whatever are perceived as United States interests. To seek to play a world imperial role is to strive for world domination. As during the era of colonial empires, the black people will inevitably be among the first and immediate victims of this policy - that includes you, the black people of the United States.
For us in southern Africa the essential content of this policy is already there. It consists in the strengthening and encouragement of the forces that are opposed to African liberation and progress and the denial of the right of the African peoples to determine their destiny. Accordingly the Reagan Administration is bent on strengthening the apartheid regime by all means possible and at all costs. It is committed to a position which seeks to ensure the survival and legitimisation of such degenerate anti-African groups as the UNITA bandits and similar groups in the region. Correspondingly, Washington is determined to debunk, characterise as terrorists and surrogates of Moscow, isolate and destroy the genuine representative of the people of Namibia, namely SWAPO, that courageous movement of people, a small people, barely a million, converted into a province of South Africa, but who have had the gallantry to take on that racist might and fight it to a standstill over years, pinning down in Namibia some one hundred thousand of its troops.
Similarly, Washington is determined to debunk, characterise as terrorists and surrogates of Moscow, isolate and destroy the ANC, tracing its history to 1912. They would destroy the ANC, exactly so that the Administration can guarantee the domination of our people by imperial America and its apartheid ally. Washington further seeks to impose its will on the independent States of southern Africa, in particular to compel these States to become partners in circumscribing their own independence, to become client States in a new imperial order and to act as accomplices in the perpetuation of white minority rule in southern Africa.
In this situation, Mr. Chairman, we believe that a special responsibility devolves on the black people of the United States whom we view as our natural allies.
Mr. Chairman, I see that my time is very limited. I shall have to skip many of the comments that I would have liked to make. I hope there would be time for us who are the immediate victims of the shifting policy of this country to spell out to you our thinking about it - it is better to lay a firm foundation for our cooperation in dealing with this new situation. It is not academic. The role of the South African regime in South Africa has been that of a terrorist, an international terrorist, if by that you mean a regime that crosses borders and terrorises its neighbours in the way that South Africa has done... for the first time in its relations with the United States and the United States people, it has had this positive endorsement and approval of those very policies. It raises some problems for the people of southern Africa. We do not underestimate the power of the fascist regime we fight in Namibia and South Africa. We cannot pooh pooh the idea that the weight, the full weight of the people of the United States, is being put behind this regime. Obviously, the burden of Africa will be the heavier for it and quite the first place where we should state this problem is the people of the United States, so that we can look at it, scrutinise it, quite realistically, aware of our own limitations, determined to find a way out. Therefore I should hope, that perhaps as we proceed with our discussions, I and my delegation and the SWAPO delegation will be able to make a further input into our concerns and how we see the situation and therefore what role we see for you here.
In the meantime, and at this point, let me welcome and express appreciation of the support we have had from prominent individuals in the United States, not all of them black, some organisations, support groups, people who have been concerned with the wellbeing and welfare and future of the black people in this country and who therefore, naturally are concerned and interested in what is happening on the African continent, and especially in that region of racism and colonialism and fascism. We thank you for what you have contributed but we have reached a point in time when we need to go back to the masses of the people of this country, to the workers, to the deprived, to the poor, to those who know racism and exploitation and repression by the experience of their own lives, so that we can combine to meet this new offensive, this new onslaught against the very concepts of human justice, human dignity and freedom of man.
We should like to thank you once again for creating this opportunity for us to be together. Thank you. 1 The Conference was organised by Transafrica, the Southern Africa Support Project and the African Studies and Research Programme of the Howard University in view of concern over the policy of the new Reagan Administration towards apartheid South Africa.
2 Moses Garoeb, Administrative Secretary of SWAPO
3 Ambassador B. A. Clark, Chairman of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, had referred to the UN-OAU International Conference on Sanctions against South Africa, held at UNESCO House, Paris, in May 1981.