African Revolutionary Writers, Part 5b
Oliver Tambo
This thoroughly confident
speech of O R Tambo’s in December 1969 (attached)
was made not long after the ANC’s Conference in May of that year that had
adopted the famous Strategy and Tactics
document.
After the banning of the ANC
in 1960, an equal or greater set-back had been the arrest of the top
revolutionary leadership at Lilieasleaf Farm, Rivonia, Johannesburg, on 11th
July 1963, including Govan Mbeki who featured here yesterday.
The 1960s, we can see now,
were far from being an interlude. What was laid down in those years is what was
going to come to pass. It meant, in Tambo’s words, that “the enemy is headed for inevitable and ignominious defeat.”
The speech was broadcast on
the anniversary of the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the “new national army” as Tambo called it.
Tambo’s typically broad
historical sweep, in this short speech, includes an acknowledgement of PAIGC,
the revolutionary liberation movement led at the time at the time by another
author in this series, Amilcar Cabral, which was about to achieve a stunning
victory.
The unbanning of the ANC and
the return of Tambo to South Africa were not achieved until more than twenty
years later. Yet it is easy to see why the ANC used to say in those years:
“Victory is Certain!”
In the next and last item in
this fifth part of our African Revolutionary Writers series we will see,
through the eyes of Comrade Mzala (Jabulani Nxumalo), how the theory and
practice of armed and political struggle drew inexorably towards its goal.
These four pieces of writing
from “Africa’s Oldest Liberation Movement”, taken together, should leave no
doubt as to the systematic and deliberate nature of the ANC’s project, and the
all-round exemplary way in which it has been carried out, to date.
You can read more of O R
Tambo’s speeches here.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Oliver Tambo,
Broadcast on the 8th Anniversary of Umkhonto we Sizwe, 1969.
