SPEECH AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, DC, JANUARY 27, 1987

Father Healy, President of Georgetown University,

Professor Howe,

Members of the faculty,

Students and invited guests,

We would like to express our appreciation to you all for giving us this opportunity to speak at this eminent seat of learning and research. An important part of your raison d'etre is the pursuit of knowledge. As scholars and thinkers, you occupy the contested boundary between truth and prejudice, engaged in a struggle of the mind to redefine the correlation between the two. We believe that as you push the frontiers of darkness backwards, you must contribute also to determine the purposes of learning and, in that context, to help better human life in all its aspects.

We have come here today to speak about racism, to reflect on the bitter experience of our people as victims of the pernicious system of apartheid. We would also like to convey to you something of the resolve of the despised millions of our country to be victims no longer, to emancipate themselves and to free their oppressors from the burdens that all who practise injustice impose upon themselves. It is our hope that in the difficult days ahead, you will stand with us, lending your intellectual excellence to the accomplishment of these objectives, and that using the power you derive from the discovery of the truth about racism in South Africa, you will help us to remake our part of the world into a corner of the globe of which all humanity can be proud.

One of the ideas that has inspired many of us in my generation of black South Africans is that race should cease to be a category that governs relations between and among peoples. Scientific enquiry and social experience have combined to bury the primitive notions that skin pigmentation was a factor which affects the intellectual capacity of individuals and an element that determines people's natural place in society. One hopes that never again will science prostitute itself to serve the ignoble purposes of those who have, in the past, argued in favour of false theses about the natural superiority of white over black people, of so-called Aryans over non-Aryans, of one race over another.

South Africa is in the grip of a life-and-death conflict to bring to an end a social order based on exactly these notions. In action, the majority of the people are saying that our country should no longer be home to the brutalising practice of white minority domination. Our struggle seeks to end one of the truly unspeakable crimes of our time, to dismantle a social system whose demise is long overdue.

Apartheid is Violence

In our country, racism is more than an expression of prejudice and the practice of discrimination. It is based on the definition of the black people as subhuman, a specific creature of the animal world available for use by those who are described as truly human and to be disposed of as befits the desires and the perceived interests of these superbeings. Apartheid is therefore inherently an act of violence. Its practice is necessarily tyrannical. The perpetuation of its relations of domination and, therefore the system itself, demands the use of repressive force.

In practice, what we are talking about is a system of virtually genocidal violence. The entire life of a whole people consists of a desperate struggle to survive a degree and extent of the daily use of violence that constitutes a truly repulsive obscenity. We speak here not only of the horrendous slaughter of those who are fighting for liberation, as you have seen from reports carried by the mass media.

We refer also to the violence perpetrated against millions of people through such apartheid policies as the bantustan system, forced removals, and the imposition of a system of education designed to prepare the black youth for a life of subservience. We are talking of the deliberate impoverishment of the majority which has resulted in millions of children dying from sheer starvation. Those who survive are condemned to become deformed adults solely because of deliberately imposed malnutrition. And as you know, when the young rebel against these genocidal policies, they are shot down like flies, imprisoned in the thousands, as is the case today, and sent to special brainwashing camps to be transformed into mindless agents of the apartheid army and police.

This violence has also become a permanent fact of life for the rest of the peoples of the region of southern Africa. There is, for instance, the untold story of the atrocities carried out by the Pretoria regime against the people of Namibia, both inside their country and in their refugee settlements in Angola. Angola itself has suffered immense losses in numbers of people killed and property destroyed, thanks to the predatory war carried out by the South African militarists and their surrogates, the so-called UNITA of Jonas Savimbi. The people of Mozambique are suffering from a similar catastrophe, with tens of thousands killed and the economy reduced to a shambles as a result of the hostile actions of the Pretoria regime and its surrogate MNR bandit force. The other countries of southern Africa are also prey to the violence of the apartheid system.

Recently, the horror of this violence has been illustrated in a dramatic fashion by the death on South African territory of former Mozambique President, Samora Machel. We remain convinced that Pretoria is responsible for this tragedy. We are also certain that directly or indirectly, this regime assassinated the former cabinet ministers of Lesotho, Vincent Makhele and Desmond Sixishe, as well as their wives.

All this, and much more, constitutes an expression of the system of apartheid, a manifestation of its true nature, a condition for its existence as well as its survival. In short, apartheid is violence.

No Alternative to Armed Violence

Consequently, to end violence in our country and in southern Africa as a whole means one thing, and one thing only. The apartheid system has to be liquidated. It must be ended in its entirety. Correctly categorised by the international community as a crime against humanity, no part of this system can and should be left intact. A crime cannot be reformed or amended. It either is or is not. It cannot be made tolerable by changes to any of the elements that make up its totality.

We therefore take issue with those who argue that to end violence in South Africa, the ANC must abandon armed struggle. We say so precisely because this would neither alter the nature of the apartheid system nor serve as moral pressure on the Pretoria regime, inducing it to abandon this system.

We speak in this manner on the basis of our own experience. For almost fifty years after its foundation in 1912, the ANC adhered strictly to a policy of nonviolence. For thirteen years after the present ruling group took power, we continued with this policy in the face of the escalating violence that it imposed on our country. As our nonviolent struggle mounted, so did the violence against us increase. The more vigorously we campaigned peacefully for a democratic and nonracial South Africa, the more fervently did the regime work to expand and entrench the violent apartheid system.

Let it not be forgotten that those who were shot down at Sharpeville in 1960 were peaceful protesters without so much as a stone in their hands. Neither should the fact be ignored that when the ANC was declared an illegal organisation in the same year, it was committed to a policy of nonviolent struggle. Again in 1976, unarmed schoolchildren were mowed down in their hundreds in the infamous Soweto massacre. Since 1960, when the ANC was banned, other organisations have been proscribed. All of these were, without exception, engaged in nonviolent struggle. Today, tens of thousands of our people are in prison, detained despite the fact that they too were involved in unarmed struggle.

The fact of the matter is that all resistance in South Africa is, according to the apartheid statutes, an illegal act. There is no constitutional provision that guarantees us the inalienable right to organise the most peaceful demonstrations. Excluded as we are from all political processes, except as administrators of the apartheid system, we have no constitutional power to change this brutal reality. How then is it expected that we can use constitutional means when the law specifically provides that we should have no access to such means?

Apartheid has decreed that any resistance can only be outside the parameters of the law. Through its practice, it imposed on us the obligation to choose whether we accept this challenge or we submit and surrender. We chose not to submit but to fight back, arms in hand. We believe that anybody else faced with this situation would have taken the same path, the way forward that your forebears took when they fought for the independence of the United States of America.

Despite the fact that we too had to make this hard choice, as your founding fathers did, we have not become slaves to the idea of violence. In the past, we resisted the efforts of the apartheid regime to draw us into an armed conflict. We resisted because we view all wars as a matter of ultimate and last resort. We are as opposed now to the killing of people, whether black or white, as we were then. Our political outlook and perspectives demand that we protect and reaffirm life. As its opponents, we cannot borrow the practices and the ethics, if that is the right word, of the apartheid regime, which has to kill daily in order to maintain a system of racial tyranny. Anybody with the slightest knowledge of our history will know how hard we have tried to reduce the level of bloodshed. We remain committed to that position. In the meantime, we have no alternative but to intensify our armed resistance because, as your Declaration of Independence says, in the face of systematic tyranny it becomes the duty and right of the people to take up arms.

We should here make the observation that those who are opposed to democratic rule inevitably develop a cult of violence. They try to imbue the use of force against the people with an aura they hope would justify and legitimate the use of terror. To the Nazis, the best among themselves were those who thrived on the act of murder. The best products of the apartheid system are, to the architects of this system, those who have come to view every massacre they carry out as the highest contribution they can make to humanity. Surely it can never be that we who struggle for a system of government by consent of the governed should ourselves make a fetish of violence and transform the use of armed force into a matter of principle. To seek a democratic society is to reject the use of violence as a means of ordering relations among people.

Our Perspectives

We seek to create a united, democratic and nonracial society. We have a vision of a South Africa in which black and white shall live and work together as equals in conditions of peace and prosperity. To this end, we repeat that we are ready to seize any opportunity that may arise to negotiate, with the aim of creating such a society. We are speaking from the position of the oppressed, who have a painful awareness of the meaning of domination and dictatorship. And yet we say it would help our people enormously if none among the political forces in our country sought to dictate terms. To do so is to seek surrender and therefore to perpetuate conflict.

The Pretoria regime seeks to do exactly this. It refuses to accept the idea that South Africa should become a united, democratic and nonracial country. It rejects the idea that there can be a legitimate political entity that represents this perspective. Rather, the Botha regime believes that it alone must set the parameters for any discussion. It must decide what are permissible political views and accordingly issue licences determining who can participate in the political process.

The racist regime denounces as communist those political views and organisations which fall outside the boundaries it wishes to set. By this means, it hopes to persuade the Western world to act against us and to come to its assistance. It also seeks to justify the persecution of the democratic movement of our country - the murder, torture, and imprisonment of its opponents. Despite the false charges it has laid against us, the Pretoria regime knows full well what the ANC stands for.

It knows that we want to see a political system in which all South Africans will have the right to vote and to be voted to any elective position without reference to colour, race, sex or creed. We are committed to the birth of a society in which all democratic freedoms would be guaranteed, including those of association, of speech and religion, the press, and so on. We wish to guarantee the rule of law and ensure the protection of the rights of the individual as a fundamental feature of any new constitutional arrangement.

At the same time, we are convinced that the new democratic order will have to address such other burning questions as freedom from hunger, disease, ignorance, homelessness and poverty. For this to be translated into reality will demand that we address seriously the question of increased production and equitable distribution of wealth. In a situation in which virtually all wealth in our country is in the hands of the white minority, we must necessarily find ways and means to redress this gross imbalance to create the situation in which it is possible radically to improve the standard of living of the millions of our people. As we see it, this situation will require that we have a mixed economy, having both a State and a private sector.

These are some of our perspectives which the Pretoria regime categorises as communist. In its view, for us to be noncommunist, we must accept the apartheid practice of defining our people as separate racial and ethnic entities which must then "share power" as groups. We must also accept as sacrosanct the distribution of the land such that as the situation obtains today, 87 percent belongs by law to the whites who constitute less than 20 percent of our population. Of course, we shall never agree to any of this but will remain committed to the objective of a truly democratic South Africa.

Let us Act Together

We consider it a matter of some concern that the falsifications peddled by the Pretoria regime about the political nature and purposes of the ANC seem to find ready acceptance among some circles in this country. We have never hidden these and are puzzled that there are people today who ascribe to us a secret agenda. We have none, and even the law courts of apartheid South Africa, despite all manner of supposed evidence presented by the secret police, have repeatedly failed to discover any such agenda.

We cannot seek to establish and build relations with the people of this country on the basis that you accept our experience as the sole and authentic basis on which you should organise yourselves and order your lives. We believe that it contributes nothing to the resolution of the South African problem for you in this country to insist that we must remake ourselves in your image. We fight for democracy because that is what our people need. We work to unite all our people around this objective because that is what our situation demands. You, too, entered into your own alliances against Nazi Germany because that was a requirement of victory. What we wish of this country, as of the rest of the world, is that we act together to achieve the common objective of bringing into being a democratic South Africa.

We believe that our common action should proceed from the starting point that we both seek to end the apartheid system in the shortest time possible and with the minimum cost in terms of loss of human lives and destruction of property. Practically, this means that we must intensify both the internal and the international offensive against apartheid.

The reality is that the pressure exerted against Pretoria is as yet insufficient. We are convinced that the international community has to impose comprehensive sanctions to reduce the bloodshed and to raise the cost of maintaining the apartheid system to a level that is unacceptable even to those who benefit from this system.

We have been greatly inspired by the sanctions imposed by the United States Congress. We take this opportunity to convey our appreciation to both the Democratic and Republican parties and to the American people as a whole. A good start has been made, but more remains to be done. Of special importance is the need to ensure that no opening is given to the Botha regime to adjust to the present set of selective sanctions and thus convince itself and its followers that sanctions do not work.

The American people have given the people of Africa hope by their activity over the past two years. First, they have come down on the right side of history by moving Congress not only to pass sanctions against apartheid South Africa but also to override President Reagan's veto. Secondly, they have helped to save millions of lives by the humanitarian aid given during the great drought in Africa. Now the American people can move to save hundreds of thousands more lives by acting to help bring about the dismantling of apartheid and the establishment of a nonracial and democratic society in South Africa.

We are also convinced that the time has come that the United States Administration reviews its policy with regard to southern Africa as a whole. This country has the possibility to make an important contribution to the resolution of the problems afflicting our region. That, however, requires that among other things, these problems should be dealt with on their merits and not viewed through the distorting prism of the East-West conflict. We, for our part, are ready to deal with the United States Government honestly and openly for the sake of the cause of justice in our country and peace in southern Africa.

The battle that is raging in South Africa aims to rid humanity of the apartheid system which is a cancerous growth on the world body politic. Our people are conscious of their duty both to themselves and the rest of the world. We shall live up to that responsibility and expand the frontiers of democracy to our country as well. To carry out this task which faces all humankind, we count on your support. We are certain you will not fail us.

Thank you.