Basics, Part 5b
O R Tambo
Strategy and
Tactics
“The art of
revolutionary leadership consists in providing leadership to the masses and not
just to its most advanced elements…”
The above line from the ANC’s Morogoro Strategy and Tactics
of 1969 (attached) can be taken as the idea of the National Democratic
Revolution (NDR) in a nutshell. Politics is in the subjective realm – it is
about the ultimate subjectivity, freedom – but politics can only have an
existence within the limits of objective realities.
Joe Slovo
The NDR has a steadily-built organisational history of
personalities, of events and of documents, working within, while at the same
time changing by its action, the balance of class forces in South Africa.
Next to the Freedom Charter, the ANC Strategy and Tactics
document of 1969 is the most prominent of all the NDR documents. In discussing
the military activities of Umkhonto we Siswe (MK), it outlines alliance
politics in terms that are sometimes crystal-clear, and sometimes not so clear.
For an example of the latter, the enemy is not well described. Still, the
Morogoro S&T is the best one to use as the basis for a discussion of the
subjective political action of this period, and for some remarks on the underlying
class realities, as well.
Dr Yusuf Dadoo
The Treason Trial had come to an end in 1959 with acquittal
of all the defendants. New campaigns were then launched, but came to an abrupt
end following the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC and the PAC.
Umkhonto we Sizwe was launched in 1961. Technically it was neither a “wing” of
the ANC, nor of the Party, and a new structure had to be put into place to make
MK accountable to the political leadership. Dr Yusuf Dadoo played a leading
role in that structure.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Strategy and Tactics,
Morogoro, 1969, ANC.
