OPENING SPEECH AT THE FIRST CONFERENCE OF THE ANC DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION AND PUBLICITY, LUSAKA, JULY 5, 1983⁽¹⁾

The Honourable Comrade Mark Tambatamba, Minister of Information and Broadcasting of the Republic of Zambia,
Comrade Major Kanana, head of the Liberation Centre,
Comrades representatives of SWAPO,
Comrade Sisinge,
Members of the Diplomatic Corps,
Comrade Secretary-General of the ANC and members of the National Executive Committee,
Comrades participants at this conference,

Allow me, Comrade Chairman, to begin by recalling Comrade Sisinge's reference to those of our comrades in South Africa and Namibia, dedicated fighters for the liberation of our peoples, heroes of our struggle, who have sacrificed their lives in the service of humankind, in the service of the people of Africa and the progressive world.

With your permission, Comrade Chairman, may I ask the Conference to rise for a minute's silence in honour of these martyred heroes.

(Conference rises, a minute's silence).

Comrade Chairman and Comrades,

I should like to add a word by way of endorsing the Chairman's expressions of our appreciation of the fact that as we meet at this First Conference of the ANC Department of Information and Publicity (DIP), we are privileged not only with the presence of a Minister of the Government of the Republic of Zambia, Comrade Mark Tambatamba, but have also had the benefit of his great message.

I should like to say that the ANC and our movement as a whole owes His Excellency President Kenneth Kaunda, the Party and the government and people of Zambia a great debt of gratitude for the immeasurable contribution that this country in its leader has made to the progress of the struggle for the liberation of Africa, in this region, in our country and in Namibia. The Honourable Minister's presence here today will be remembered during the months and years in which we shall be putting into operation, executing, decisions that will be taken by this Conference.

Equally, we are all very happy to find ourselves in the company of our comrades-in-arms of SWAPO with whom we share a common trench; and we greet them, salute them for the heroic struggle that they are waging against the fascist regime.

There is no doubt in the minds of anyone of us that SWAPO and the People's Liberation Army of Namibia are destined to vanquish the Pretoria forces and seize back their country.

Comrade Chairman, it is a great pleasure for me, personally, for the members of the National Executive Committee and the heads of various departments of the ANC and our movement as a whole, heads of our sister organisations, to be participants, however briefly, at this meeting - if only because it brings together the people, the comrades, the workers who between them constitute the voice of our liberation movement, the authentic voice of the fighting people of our country. But, equally, we wish to welcome you, especially those comrades who have come in from remote areas, attending a conference of supreme importance for the future conduct of our revolutionary struggle.

The African National Congress has called this conference of the Department of Information and Publicity at a most crucial time in our liberation struggle - a time when the horizon of our liberation is dominated by the rays of a new dream; a time when, after trudging through centuries in the dark tunnel of colonial and racist domination, national oppression and economic exploitation, our people have now seen the light ahead and we know that no force on earth can indefinitely postpone the historic moment of victory because there is no force more powerful than the spirit of a people who have decided to endure bannings, torture, imprisonment, assassinations, hangings and massacres as the price of freedom, of liberation.

Our people have been the victims of these crimes at the hands of the Pretoria apartheid regime over a period of decades. Despite these crimes, however, indeed even because of them, the liberation struggle has grown in strength and effectiveness. Resistance to apartheid measures has stiffened at national and local community levels. The workers' movement, consistently militant, is closing its ranks and consolidating a united force which has further alarmed the fascists into threatening to confront the workers with police brutality. And not without reason: our brutally exploited workers have the potential power to reduce racist South Africa's economy to a shambles as part of the struggle for a new socio-economic order in our country. For the exploiters, this is a frightening prospect.

On the wider political front, moves towards uniting all the democratic forces within the country in a broad democratic front are being vigorously pursued. With the Freedom Charter as the basis of united action and direction, a wide spectrum of our people are coming together across the colour line and group interests to confront and defeat the Botha regime in its attempts to strengthen and consolidate the apartheid system through the so-called constitutional proposals.

Towards the end of last year and in the period since then, the Maseru massacre, the attack on the Koeberg nuclear station and on the Air Force Headquarters in Pretoria, the criminal air raid on Maputo and the barbarous murder of the ANC Three in Pretoria - all these combine to demarcate a new level in the armed conflict between the fascist regime and the popular masses led by the ANC and its allies.

What is indisputable in this conflict is that the fascist regime has been put on the defensive by the revolutionary forces. Indeed, gone forever are the heydays of the Strijdom era,⁽²⁾

when the apartheid system was proudly and arrogantly described as a form of baaskap or white domination. A new reality has set in. The regime has awakened to the fact that the apartheid system is in danger of being overthrown - destroyed by forces which have proved irrepressible and irresistible.

This new awareness had reflected itself in the introduction of the words "survival" into the political and military vocabulary of the racist regime's strategists. Today it is the issue of survival that dominates all strategic thinking and calculation on the part of the Pretoria regime. Hence the well-known and much-canvassed "total strategy for survival". This was conceived as a defensive strategy against an attacking force, but it is being used for aggression and in a bid to reconquer and recolonise Africa.

If the regime has to worry about survival, that is because our revolutionary struggle is registering demonstrable advances towards the citadel of apartheid reaction, with the popular masses using their united strength and armed might to strike increasingly heavy blows against the enemy. We are on the offensive and are advancing. What we now need is a total strategy for victory.

This conference has been called because in the implementation of such a strategy, our information and publicity services have a key role to play. If we examine the racist regime's struggle for survival, we see that it is fighting on several battle fronts. It is engaging the liberation forces in South Africa, it is clinging tenuously onto Namibia against mounting pressure from SWAPO, it is waging an undeclared war against African independent States, it is campaigning for international support.

Its actions and activities on all these fronts are covered and supported by a powerful information and propaganda campaign which has successfully saturated some innocent minds with a mass of misinformation, distortion, shameless lies and disinformation. Through such draconian measures as the Police Amendment Act, the Newspaper Registration Amendment Act, the Protection of Information Act and other legislation, the regime has succeeded in coercing the South African press and other media into playing a vital role in the regime's propaganda campaign.

The most important target audience for the regime's campaign is the white section of our population. The majority among this section have been completely misled about the realities of the situation in southern Africa and in South Africa particularly. They are not allowed to know the truth, least of all what the ANC is saying and doing about their future - the future of all South Africans, the future of our country.

They do not know the history and political content of the Pretoria bomb attack and will learn the wrong lesson from it. The regime keeps them in the dark to ensure their unquestioning support for and endorsement of its crimes. Now that the regime finds itself threatened by the growing struggle for the liberation of South Africa and for the liberation of all its people, the Botha-Malan clique is ordering the white civilian population - everyone above the age of 16 - to join the SADF and take up positions in "the first line of defence" and stand ready to lay down their lives in defence of a criminal system that is already on history's list of the dead or dying.

The interests of victory for our struggle demand that the voice of our movement be now heard clearly among our white compatriots, whatever obstacle the regime may place in our way. In general, and particularly in the unfolding situation, the voice of the ANC is, perhaps as never before, in great demand, especially inside South Africa. It is therefore essential that the Department of Information and Publicity responds appropriately to the great challenges posed by the spreading and escalating struggle against the racist regime and its imperialist allies.

A strong and effective DIP has become an urgent necessity. However, this should not be understood to mean that the DIP has been ineffectual. Indeed, over the years the comrades serving in the various sectors of the Department, often under tremendous odds, have responded admirably to the demands of our struggle and greatly improved both the quantity and quality of our output.

In this connection we wish to express the gratitude of the ANC for all the support and material assistance given to our DIP by friendly governments, among them the Republic of Zambia; by international bodies and institutions, support groups and solidarity organisations. We especially appreciate the initiatives taken in official statements, radio broadcasts, newspaper articles and various publications which give information and make supportive comment on our struggle and on developments in our country. In cooperation with our DIP, we can together thwart and neutralise the apartheid regime's propaganda campaign. Together, we can effectively counter the psychological onslaught by the Pretoria regime against the ANC and against SWAPO. We can counter Pretoria's lies and slander against independent Africa and even turn the psychological war against the regime.

The exchange of information between our DIP and the relevant information organs of the various countries here in Africa is pivotal to our concerted propaganda offensive. The coming into being of the Pan African News Agency (PANA) is a most welcome development. Over the decades, the dissemination of information has been, and it continues to be, the monopoly of the developed and industrialised Western countries. Naturally this has not operated in favour of Africa. The Western media has concentrated on reporting negative aspects about our various countries. Efforts aimed at development, including actual economic and social progress, have gone largely unreported by the Western media. PANA is a small beginning but a beginning nonetheless.

In so far as apartheid South Africa is concerned, we are confident that PANA will serve as a vehicle to educate the peoples of Africa about the crimes daily committed by the Pretoria regime in southern Africa and about the revolutionary struggles being fought to gain the total liberation of the continent.

It is in this context that we should look at this conference of the DIP. The conference has the task of putting its finger on the pulse of our DIP. We should identify the problem areas and propose ways and means of remedying some of the problems and difficulties which have confronted our information machinery. The task that confronts this conference is not an easy one; the difficulties and problems are manifold, yet not insurmountable. The resolution of these problems will surely go towards making our propaganda department a mighty weapon in the hands of the struggling people of South Africa. We must put our propaganda on a war-footing; we must chart new ways and means of moving forward to victory - victory for our country, our continent and for humanity.

Having referred to some of the tasks facing us, it becomes imperative that we define the nature and essence of our Department of Information. In doing so, we need also to define the qualities desired of a specialist cadre of the DIP. Our point of departure in defining the nature of the department must be the very nature of the conflict in South Africa and the nature of our vanguard liberation movement, the ANC.

The nature of the conflict in South Africa is one of a struggle between the forces of fascist oppression and racist exploitation whose method is war and aggression directed against our people and neighbours, which forces are led by the Nationalist Party of Botha and Malan, on the one hand, and the forces of national liberation, and social and cultural emancipation, led by the ANC on the other hand. In short, a struggle between violent imperialist-inspired reaction and revolutionary progress.

Given that our movement is a uniting force, an organiser, a mobiliser, an educator and leader of the widest sections of our people, the DIP must of necessity be a finely tuned specialist instrument that clearly and comprehensively grasps the overall task of the ANC and its role and place in the struggle of our people for their national rights in particular, and the general struggle of humanity for a just, peaceful and prosperous world.

By its very nature, therefore, our media, organised in the DIP, can only and must be a partisan media, deriving its objectivity from its historically principled position, representing historical truth and a real and correct consciousness.

It must therefore be a DIP that critically examines the traditional structures of media institutions guided by the essence of the media as a political instrument of the contending parties in this conflict.

It must seek to anchor itself deeply amongst the people of our country, creating true communication amongst our various communities and between these communities and their leadership in the ANC. It must further seek to create communication and a truthful awareness between our struggling people and the allies in the worldwide anti-imperialist front.

It must therefore be a DIP whose cadre has chosen sides in this conflict, a cadre that has chosen the side of the most oppressed sections of our people, one that has chosen the struggle for progress. It must be a cadre that measures to the challenges of modern day communication and psychological warfare and masters the art of revolutionary propaganda in conditions of national liberation struggle. Obviously this cannot be a cadre that is ready-made and packaged. It is a cadre that the ANC itself must develop.

Our struggle for national liberation takes place within the context of the international struggle between the forces of progress, freedom and independence for all nations, big or small, and the forces of reaction, imperialism, exploitation and colonialism. Since our struggle is anti-colonial and anti-imperialist in essence, it goes without saying that we are allied to all anti-imperialist forces in the world.

Our movement, the ANC, has consistently and steadfastly supported the ideal of a strong and united OAU. After the highly successful Summit held in Addis Ababa last month, we are confident that the OAU will take the Chad problems in its stride as it proceeds to focus its attention and directs its energies to the undeclared war unleashed by the Pretoria colonialists on member States of the OAU in southern Africa, and the bitter struggles by SWAPO and the ANC for the total liberation of Africa.

The war of destabilisation against independent States includes a hysterical and frantic campaign directed at the ANC which, proscribed by the regime in 1960, has now come alive in the hearts and minds of the popular masses and the oppressors alike. The ANC is the subject of daily comment by the leading spokesmen of the regime; it is the object of persistent threats of assassination and massacre against its members wherever they may be; the ANC has become the pretext for acts and threats of aggression by the regime against independent Africa. The regime has placed the ANC at the heart of its problems in southern Africa. The frantic militarisation of South Africa is explained in terms of the threat posed by the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Desperate in the extreme, the regime has even pretended that it is the protector and defender, against the ANC, of the very masses who for more than three decades have been the victims of the regime's violence, and who are themselves the ANC.

Comrade Chairman and Comrades,

Let us make it clear: The regime will destroy itself long before it destroys the ANC, long before it destroys the popular masses of which ANC members are an integral part.

The struggle continues!

It is now my pleasure to declare this Conference open. ¹ From: Tambo papers

² J.G. Strijdom was Prime Minister of South Africa from 1954 to 1958.