9 August 1983(1)
We greet all present in the name of our liberation movement, the African National Congress of South Africa (ANC). On behalf of the ANC Women's Section and of the millions of women in our country, we salute this United Nations body and sincerely thank it for granting us the special honour of participating here on this very special occasion.
We should like to extend our thanks to all those who have spoken here before us for their unswerving support for the women of South Africa and Namibia.
The many activities of the Special Committee against Apartheid and its various sections are known far and wide, but today we especially want to acknowledge with profound gratitude the role played by the Special Committee in promoting this year as the Year of the South Africa Woman, as declared by the ANC. We deeply appreciate the immensity of the tasks before this Committee, aimed at reaching our common objectives. With consistent dedication and unswerving commitment to the principles of truly just justice and genuine democracy, which the peoples of Namibia and South Africa so hunger and struggle for, this Committee will remain an active ingredient of the world's conscience, resolved to wipe the scourge of apartheid from the face of the earth. We are quite confident that, though the road may be rough and sometimes burdened with hurdles that force a temporary retreat, at the end of the day we shall together reap a good yield: the establishment of a free, non-racial and democratic South Africa. We strongly believe that this is the only meaningful and lasting monument to the tireless efforts undertaken by men and women of this world in solidarity with our struggle.
We are here today to honour the defiant bravery, the resilience, the spirit of "no surrender to dehumanization", the organizational ability and capacity and, above all, the exemplary united action of some 20,000 strong women, their hearts and minds fixed on one goal: to confront the hierarchy in the very citadel of apartheid power, racist Pretoria. From various walks of life, from a multitude of ethnic groups and nationalities, they surged forward until the colourful streams converged.
When these stalwarts did converge - organized from the ANC Women's League, from the Congress of Democrats, from the South African Indian Congress and from the Coloured People's Organization - they pulsed with the single beat of one gigantic heart. It was so because they were then unstoppable in their resolve to demonstrate concretely and to demand an alternative to the divisive path of apartheid. Under apartheid laws, white, Indian and Coloured women - in precisely that stratified classification - could as well have stayed at home, consoling themselves with the relative comforts and privileges given them to set them apart from African women. White, Indian and Coloured women carry no passes, yet they came: the franchised white, the disenfranchised Coloured and the voteless African and Indian; the literate and those rendered illiterate by the system; those with rights of property ownership and those stripped of such rights and now scheduled for systematic land dispossession and about to be completely robbed of their South African citizenship. For once, our women made their point in unison.
It could not have been otherwise as long as the humanity, dignity and womanhood of the African was in jeopardy because of the imposition of the pass laws on African women, as long as their own self-respect and humanity was at stake. Thus they scorned and scoffed at apartheid's dubious protection of white, Indian and coloured womanhood at the expense of the African. They completely identified with the lowly.
When those thousands of voices broke into a now well-known freedom song, Wathinta 'Bafazi Wathint' Imbokodo Uzokufa - "Strijdom, you have touched the women; you have struck a rock; you have dislodged a boulder; you will be struck" - when they punctuated this song with the people's national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel' Afrika, indeed a glorious political landmark was reached in the annals of our liberation struggle.
We are indeed proud of the indomitable leadership of the late Lillian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Amina Cachalia and Sophie Williams, our history-makers, custodians of our living tradition. The tactical weapon of struggle bestowed on the country in 1956 had been fully vindicated, endorsed and extended to embrace all freedom-lovers in 1955. At that time the most representative gathering ever in the history of our country, the Congress of the People, adopted the Freedom Charter. There, in Kliptown, women and men stood together, refusing to wear blinkers while being herded into colonial apartheid's separate, unequal and destructive compartments. They rose in one solemn voice to declare:
"These freedoms we shall fight for side by side throughout our lives until we have won our liberty."
Together, black and white could storm, and could and did rise to the imperative of the moment. They became an inseparable part of that huge national heart and soul which, even at this very moment, wants to free itself and unleash a collective dynamism towards the liberation of one and all. It is this life-saving and sustaining United Front tradition that the people of South Africa are the inheritors of. This year, as they observe 9 August, our people will recall with a new poignancy and urgency the formidable might of a strategy that unites both critically and on fundamental ethical principles, rather than a strategy that capitulates and panders to apartheid's own skin strategy or colour tactics.
Numerous poems have been written and praises sung immortalizing the continuing gallantry and dauntless spirit of our women. Allow me to share these few lines dedicated to Helen Joseph, a white freedom-fighter. This is a poem written by a woman who must have been a toddler in 1956; it is entitled "Dedication".
"Mother of freedom, Helen,
At seventy-three still a threat.
What savagery aimed against her:
Bullets, batons, shattering windows."Helen Joseph has defeated aggression;
Her soul is free from racial contamination.
Mother, lover of freedom,
Dauntless ever.
Look at her, refusing bread in old age;
Eating rock
With the downtrodden.
Her heart grows fonder, profounder."Her face is carved from steel
Her eye is gentle and brave:
She enters the dock, stands still
Listens carefully: the indictment read...
It says nothing, nothing base about her
Not anything to brand her foe of the people
The people she lovingly serves.
So she swallows and takes a deep breath."We are winning the battle:
Down to the dark cell she strides
The Amandla trumpets behind her
Blowing, blowing, blowing...."
Never has apartheid's total disrespect of human life and values been at today's level. Those who attempt to oppose it can expect detainment, solitary confinement, torture, imprisonment, house arrest, banning, banishment to remote areas and even assassination for their belief in a free, non-racial and democratic society. Only yesterday, Jabu Nyawuse died a brutal death in a car-bomb explosion in Swaziland. Only yesterday, Ruth First opened the last parcel in her life, sent with the Devil's own hatred by the regime's agents. Today, Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter, Katryn, are no longer with us. They were killed by a parcel bomb in Angola. Last year Jeanette was reported to have said:
"All political activists, whether they are inside or outside South Africa, have a real fear of assassination. Danger is nothing new. Wherever you are, you have to accept danger."
To uphold the cause of liberty is to be ready to make the supreme sacrifice. It is therefore with a sense of realism that we remind ourselves today that our people, the people of Namibia and the people of the front-line States are indeed in the forefront of defence of the principles of the United Nations Charter and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
Often, in our dealings with the system of apartheid, again and again we ask ourselves the simple question: But what manner of human beings are these who can so meticulously and so elaborately plan for the debasement, the destruction, of millions? To understand fully the scope, the dimensions, of the criminality of apartheid, it is incumbent upon us to remember the words of John Balthazar Vorster, one-time Prime Minister of South Africa, one of the chief architects of apartheid, who said:
"We believe in Christian nationalism, an ally of fascism in Italy. You may call this undemocratic principle a dictatorship, if you wish.... In Germany they call it national socialism."
Clearly, our peoples are victims of nazism revisited. And the authors of this anti-black, anti-people doctrine need no gas chambers or concentration camps. They are more shrewd in their ways than their predecessors. The more than 2,000 pieces of plunderous legislation designed to restrict black workers and work-seekers not only make family life a rare luxury but also more importantly those laws make impossible the very existence of the black majority. This must be the result of a well-thought-out ideology.
Though the notorious "Orderly Removal and Settlement of Black Persons Bill" - alias "Genocide Bill" - was postponed in Parliament, all the tenets of that obnoxious legislation are being implemented daily with a zeal and finesse known only to those who place no value on black life.
Any pretext is used for removing people from productive to barren areas. We must clear the way for civilization. In Inanda, Natal, the people are to move even now. The excuse is to make room for a dam. But they must give up their animal holdings, since their new home will not accommodate both man and beast.
In other words, whites will have to buy their cattle, their sheep and their goats. The people are resisting fiercely, because they know the truth, as stated by them:
"Every time this Government plans, it plays tricks on us. It makes false promises.... If this dam were to help us, no force could be used to move us."
In the Transvaal the apartheid axe fell on the Bathlokwa people, as it has on so many others. Since time immemorial, they had occupied an area which had three rivers running through it. They were bulldozed out of their ancestral grounds, which were given to white farmers. The people were moved to an area without a single river. There, doomed to wait for death, in hopelessness as they watch the last of their herd dying.
In Botshabelo, in the Orange Free State, people live without prospects of finding employment. The best job that they can expect to find is night-soil removal. Of course, the people have been fighting over carcasses of discarded chickens, along the boundaries of a nearby chicken farm. Imagine the sight of 300 or so persons waiting out in the veld for dead chickens. Now even the dead and rotting chickens no longer come. In that community of some 2,000 persons the number of children's graves grows faster than those of the adults. Children aged two or younger account for 35 per cent of all deaths in that area. Malnutrition and kwashiorkor are still the number one killers of children in South Africa - that is, black children.
The seriousness of this bizarre situation is that it is taking place in the most industrialized, the richest, country on the African continent. It is also in a country which dumps tons of fruits in the ocean to keep prices high - prices that are unaffordable for many poor persons. It is also a country which digs trenches to dispose of litres and litres of milk. Cynically, the representative of the Dairy Farmers' Association has made the following comment: "Poor people do not have the capacity to take all the surplus milk we have."
For Hout Bay people in the Cape life is literally impossible. They are women and children who come from the drought-stricken Transkei where food and jobs are scarce. They started by making their plastic homes in the bushy sand dunes near the harbour where their husbands work. But the law discovered them. After the general crackdown, after watching the destruction of their plastic and tree-branch homes, women and children, including children aged two, were arrested.
Reflecting on the whole programme of removals, Archbishop Dennis Hurley concludes:
"If most black people are moved to bantustans, even though these homelands cannot feed and maintain their present population which increases daily, it must mean that we must allow these people to starve to death."
The international community is absolutely correct in branding apartheid a crime against humanity. The outcome of all the vicious schemes is consistent with the conclusions reached by the Riekert Commission set up by the regime in 1979. According to Riekert - the Chairman of that Commission - the South Africa of the future will need only 2.5 million Africans for all its labour needs. That is when Africans will be in the minority and will not have to carry passes. The rest, 21.5 million, must be compressed into lifeless bantustans. In fact, these are our latter-day concentration camps.
Indians and Coloureds are also being removed but to a lesser degree than Africans. And to sugar-coat the debilitating impact of removals, the opportunistic Indians and Coloureds allow themselves to be co-opted, wooed, baited and dragged into inferior partnership within a racist tricameral Parliament.
Given the advances made in the liberation struggle inside our country, the degree of unity achieved and the high level of political consciousness witnessed, especially in the last three decades, the regime is desperately trying to stop the wheels of history. The new constitution brandished in the name of reform is yet another grossly backward piece of legislation. It is contrived to cause confusion, bitterness and division amongst the oppressed and ultimately it is aimed at entrenching white supremacy, especially Nazi-inspired Nationalist Party domination over everybody. The unpopularity of the coming bogus elections is no deterrent to the regime to proceed. Rather, it continues to harass and detain those patriots who call for a boycott of the elections. It is a fraudulent scheme to hoodwink a section of the oppressed and it is known to the majority of the oppressed to be just that. Addressing our people over Radio Freedom, the ANC President, Comrade Tambo, spelled out the implications of what voting would mean in these words:
"If you vote you will be voting for the perpetuation of the apartheid system.
"If you vote you will be voting for the continued domination of the black people by a white minority.
"If you vote you will be offering your sons and daughters for military conscription into an army whose principal task is to fight the oppressed and to terrorize independent countries of southern Africa.
"If you vote you will be selling your birthright and your future for a mess of pottage.
"If you vote you will be helping the enemy to plant seeds of disunity and prolonged bitterness.
"We must refuse to be herded into apartheid booths like cattle into abattoirs.
"We are not cattle.
"We are men and women with a right a will to say no to the polling slaughterhouse of apartheid."
Pursuing its policy of domination of South Africa and the whole region, the apartheid regime is building up its military arsenal to alarming proportions. This it does at the same time that it has assured the world that a new era of peace now reigns in the region because of peace pacts. This year the military budget, which had already reached a $3 billion mark, was increased by 21 per cent, security by 23 per cent and police forces by 45 per cent. How can peace be established when there are frantic preparations for war, including nuclear possibilities? What kind of peace is this? It is peace without internal justice, without equality and peace by duress. Peace without transformation is peace without honour, a tyrannical peace.
The decision of the United Nations Security Council on the independence of Namibia has been vetoed by South Africa with characteristic impunity over extraneous points. Angola remains invaded. What kind of peace is that? The people of South Africa desperately need peace. We have not known it for over three centuries. Our struggle in the various forms it takes is ultimately the only valid pre-condition for a just peace for the entire region.
Apologists for and defenders of apartheid celebrate these peace ventures because they know quite well that apartheid guarantees their super-profits. They know also that those enormous returns are extracted from super-exploited black labour. Thus in a real sense apartheid merely wields the whip to keep us in line for whites to maintain their privileges and the highest standard of living anywhere on earth, on the one hand, and, on the other, it is the transnational corporations that fuel apartheid and maintain it because it guarantees them maximum profits - and that is what the sale of weapons is all about.
We are here today to bring you also the assurances of the women of South Africa and of the ANC that there is no power on earth which can divert us from the path of liberating our country. In this Year of the South African Women, we urge our sisters and friends in Africa and throughout the entire world to support us by demanding the unconditional release of all political prisoners in South Africa; by demanding that captured freedom fighters be granted prisoner-of-war status in accordance with the relevant Geneva Conventions that cover the armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against foreign and racist regimes in exercise of their inalienable right to self-determination and independence; by participating actively in the implementation of the United Nations comprehensive and mandatory sanctions against apartheid South Africa; by intensifying boycotts in the cultural and sports fields; by mobilizing to show effective implementation of the arms embargo against racist South Africa; and by intensifying material and diplomatic support for the independent African States neighbouring on South Africa.
The Women's Section of the ANC salutes the heroic bravery of the women inside South Africa who are waging a tireless struggle right inside the belly of the beast. To them we make a solemn pledge never to tire until apartheid colonialism has been overthrown by the might of a united people. To our sisters and fellow combatants of Namibia, led by their sole vanguard movement, the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), we extend our embrace and vow never to desert our common trench even beyond the attainment of Namibia's independence. We pledge our support to the women of Western Sahara, led by POLISARIO, to the women of El Salvador, led by the Farabundo Marti National. Front, and to the women of Nicaragua. Our deepest appreciation goes also for the support and solidarity we enjoy from our sisters in the African countries, the socialist countries, the Nordic countries, the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement and the progressive forces in all Western countries.