Oliver Reginald Tambo: the president of presidents
The former ANC president remains an undersung Struggle hero, yet his leadership was marked by resilience and tenacity, writes Vusi Shongwe
“NEVER forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over.” – American female civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hammer
THE glorious history of the struggle for liberation in South Africa has occasioned upon us formidable giants and stalwarts. One among many who stands out like a cathedral in a citadel is Oliver Reginald Tambo.
Arguably, although contemporary lenses may provide an exciting kaleidoscope of perspectives, it may also discolour, distort or compromise our viewpoint as we are not immersed in the existential conditions of the era that we are trying to dissect and analyse.
If we are to avoid errors of judgement, we must try to see Tambo in his own unique context of the struggle for liberation in South Africa and not ours.
Even within that context, Tambo was an outstanding human being.
It is, however, sad that history has become oblivious of Tambo. Not only has he not taken his rightful place in the memories of those he laid down his life for, the people, but his contribution as a patriot and mentor of the ANC has also been overlooked, thus robbing him of the honour he so rightfully deserves.
Tambo remains largely obscured in the shadow of other eminent members of the ANC
This is despite the fact that his career distinguishes him as one of the venerated leaders of the struggle for freedom in South Africa.
He was a committed freedom fighter who was not seduced by the trappings of celebrity and populism, as he had the resolve to attain freedom for his people regardless of the cost to his life.
It is time to rescue Tambo from historical amnesia and political anonymity, and have him restored to his deserved position in the public domain.
The government should therefore be commended for dedicating 2017 to this revolutionary giant. Arguably, this will help educate South Africans on what he stood for – especially the young ones, as they hardly know who Tambo was.
It is hard to find the right word to capture the essence of the formidable leader that Tambo was.
I have thought long and hard, and the best words I could find are “tenacity” and “resilience”.
Tambo pursued the goal of liberation with unrelenting energy and perseverance. Those who knew him remember him for his consistency in demonstrating brilliance in unique ways.
He was as skilled at connecting facts and ideas as he was at connecting people.
His mind was always churning, weaving ideas and strategies with facts and figures.
According to Thabo Mbeki, Tambo was a leader who could deal with both the concrete and the abstract. With the scientist’s level of precision, he would master the specific, the particular, while equally comprehending the general and the whole. According to Mandela, if there is one person who symbolises “the crystallisation and personification of what the ANC is and become, that person would be Oliver Tambo”.
When his name is mentioned, the term great comes to mind. But what determines greatness? How does one measure a person’s greatness? Is it by his or her wealth? One’s physical strength? Or one’s mental prowess? HG Wells, asserts that, “a man’s greatness can be measured by what he leaves to grow, and whether he started others to think along fresh lines with a vigour that persisted after him”.
In a review in Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness, edited by Walter Isaacson, it is averred that “the qualities that define great leadership are almost as mercurial and indecipherable as those that identify great art: one notices more their absence than their presence, and sometimes a rear-view mirror is necessary to determine if they ever existed at all.”
This is particularly true of Tambo, the Moses of South Africa’s liberation struggle, who, not only kept the fires burning, or the struggle for freedom alive, but also led the ANC with great aplomb during the days in exile.
Tambo was an original thinker and a magnificent leader. South Africans owe him a debt of gratitude for an indelible contribution he has made to humanity – his kindness, magnanimity, humility and gentleness.
Armed with a BSc degree, he could have easily led a relatively good life, but chose to sacrifice his personal ambition for the sake of his country.
As pointed out by Mbeki, in his foreword in the book, Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains, by Luli Callinicos, more than anyone else, Tambo personified the leadership of the ANC when many of its leaders were in prison or exile.
He served in this capacity with humility, always insisting that it was incorrect to present him as the president of the ANC. Mbeki further observes, without ever wavering, Tambo always argued that he was merely the acting president of the ANC.
Again, Mbeki reminds us that for the sake of our heritage, identity and pride as a nation, all South Africans dare not allow ourselves to forget what Tambo did so that we can reclaim our human dignity. Mbeki further maintains that without the memory and spirit of Tambo in our midst, serving as our guide, our present and future will have a poverty of meaning.
Tambo was not fazed by the fact that Mandela was the centre of attention and celebrity par excellence. He was, as pointed out by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, properly self-assured and did not suffer from a sense of inferiority.
When Mandela was released, Tambo did not feel that he was made to play second fiddle. Peter Hain, once a British cabinet minister, called Tambo “the undersung hero”, but hastened to add that Tambo was never undersung by Mandela or the rest of us involved in the eventual triumph of freedom and democracy. Tambo was a true believer of non-racialism. When interviewed by Time Magazine, he was magnanimous when he said: “I would not hesitate to vote for a white person as president if I thought he was the best person for the job.”
When advised against attending the funeral in Lesotho of 27 ANC members who had been mowed
In the face of abuse, violence and exile from his native land, he never gave up hope
down by the apartheid regime, Tambo replied: “Listen, I was talking to Samora Machel… and he was saying the same thing. But you know those people are in Lesotho because of me. And now, when the Boers have attacked them and mowed them down, I must now sit back and say I can’t go to Lesotho to go and bury them because there is a likelihood that I might be shot down. That’s cowardice of the first order. I am going to Lesotho. I’m going to be with the relatives of those people who were killed in Lesotho. This is the only decent way of doing it.” That was Tambo. He led by example.
The aura and the respect Tambo commanded internationally was perhaps best demonstrated during his visit to Manhattan’s Riverside Church in New York in 1987. Reporting about this visit, the editorial of the newspaper The Nation described Tambo as the slight, reserved, intensely focused visitor who came with the credentials of a revolutionary and displayed the presence of a president.
When opening a memorial in honour of Tambo in a North London park, Britain’s lord chancellor and then-secretary of state, Jack Straw, remarked that “today we celebrate one’s man’s contribution to the freedom of millions…. He continued: “Oliver Tambo was and remains an inspiration. He was a tireless campaigner for justice, equality and democracy – rights, we here in the UK take for granted, which, without the efforts of Oliver, millions of South Africans might still be denied. In the face of abuse, violence and exile from his native land, he never gave up, he never tired, and he never lost hope.”
Sadly, despite his best efforts in leading the struggle for freedom, Tambo regrettably did not live long enough to see the oppressors turfed out of office.
If Tambo were to wake up from his eternal sleep, he would decry the present state of affairs in the ANC, especially the conspicuous immersion of some of its members in crass materialism; a situation that represents the era best known as the era of the politics of the stomach or, to use Michela Wrong’s words, the “our turn to eat” era.
This is an era where the moral compass that guided us in the liberation struggle period has been decalibrated – where an avowed distaste for individual possession of wealth has been replaced by the vision of our existence as a merciless contest in conspicuous consumption.
This has resulted in a dislocated and disoriented conception of ourselves which is manifested in our preoccupation with populating the machineries of our nation state with people who pursue narrow, parochial individual concerns at the expense of the greater South African humanity.
Tambo would be shocked to discover that stimulating intellectual and political discussions have suddenly been replaced by heckling and howling, a sign attesting to the fact that political bankruptcy has crept in.
Devastate
The current political shenanigans playing themselves out in the country would devastate Tambo because they have the potential of vitiating the critical milestones that have been achieved by one of the mighty political movements to ever come from Africa, the ANC.
The political insolvency that has replaced the robust intellectual and lively debates is a blot to the image of the ANC.
A party widely acclaimed and renowned to be steeped in the tradition of vibrant intellectual discourses is now on the brink of the cesspit of the contrary. Robust intellectual combats are no longer relished anymore.
People now engage in the “politics of personal destruction” whose aim is to harm those they disagree with.
As the ANC braces itself for both the policy and elective conferences, there are significant lessons that could be learnt from the yesteryear leadership of the ANC, especially from Tambo.
At a press conference in June 1985 in Lusaka, Tambo said: “Those of us who are the true liberators should not fight among ourselves. Let us not allow the enemy’s dirty tricks succeed in getting us to fight one another.”
Known for his always incredible prescient analysis on political dynamics, Tambo’s extraordinary cautionary words are as relevant today as they were at the time they were first uttered.
Ironically, the ANC was experiencing internal problems albeit not at a scale that it is experiencing now.
His cautionary words are worth remembering as we honour his memory.
The ANC can only disregard the views of its legends and veterans, who are calling for self- introspection, at its own peril.
Somehow, leadership must understand the value of “honest criticism”, as Du Bois puts it.
Criticism by those whose interests are affected is, in his view, “the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society”.
Addressing his people, President Igo Smirnov of Transnistria, near Ukraine, once said: “We must save the heritage of our heroic senior generation. Their feat will remain for centuries as a caution for our descendants, as a lesson of courage, of selfless service to the Fatherland, of fidelity to the ideals of good and justice.
Smirnov’s words are equally relevant to the would-be elected new leadership of the ANC to always remember the ideals that shaped the founders of this mighty organisation.
Equally important, Maurice Halbwachs reminds us that “the present generation may rewrite history, but it does not write it on a blank page”.
Even amid times of turmoil and turbulence, amid the inevitable political vicissitudes and tidal waves, political cleavages and chasms, true leaders of the ANC must rise up and show leadership.
They must rise up to honour the memory of Tambo and all those who sacrificed their lives for the ANC and the country.
They must rise up to help arrest the downward slide to end what South African politics has become – a messy, deceitful, treacherous and murderous affair.
There is a need for recreating political institutions where human decency prevails over ruthless and anarchical political strategies, and civility triumphs over callous political manoeuvring.
It has been said, in another context, that in estimating a person’s achievements, the world agrees to call great those who have done or produced something of permanent value.
Furthermore, that we call great those who devoted their energies to a noble cause, or influenced the course of things in some extraordinary way; and that to achieve this, there is in every instance a universal condition that the man shall have forgotten himself in his works, without attention to the honours that success will bring him.
Viewed in this sense, posterity will remember Oliver Reginald Tambo as a great man.
Shongwe works in the KZN Office of the Premier. The article is written in his personal capacity.