OR’s impeccable moral values are needed now more than ever

ON OCTOBER 27, 99 years ago, Oliver Reginald Tambo was born.

His qualities as a human quickly became evident. He showed unsurpassed dedication to his studies, matriculating as a top student in 1938.

He went on to complete his degree at the University of Fort Hare, where he, along with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, became founding members of the ANC Youth League in 1943.

In 1959, he became Secretary General of the ANC after Walter Sisulu had been banned by the South African government under the Suppression of Communism Act and later Deputy President. Chief Albert Luthuli, himself a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, said of OR after listening to one of his speeches: “Even if I and others in the leadership of the ANC were to die, we know that there are young people like Oliver Tambo, who are ready to take responsibility for the African National Congress.”

As fate would have it, Chief Luthuli’s untimely death meant OR had to take over the reins as president.

But as OR himself admitted: “I had other plans for my life. I wanted to be a minister of the Anglican church. I was going to train for the ministry in Cape Town. But God had other plans for me. God’s plan was for me to fight in the political liberation for my people.”

It meant OR brought all his values that had led him to the house of the Lord into the political movement. Such values were evident in many of his speeches.

He would say, for instance: “Some of us don’t like violence at all. I have an abhorrence of violence – I even take insects out of the bath. But we are forced into violence.”

OR was generous and selfless and did not consider clinging to his presidency.

He said of Madiba: “The world public in general assumed that NR (Nelson Rolhlahla) was the president and we found it unnecessary to correct the impression because we always made it clear our national leaders (mine included) were on Robben Island, serving life in jail.”

Thabo Mbeki, considered by many as OR’s favourite son, had a favourite Bible verse, which I must assume was frequently shared by OR, from the book of Proverbs: “Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it. Say not unto thy neighbour, “Go, and come again, and tomorrow I will give; when thou hast it by thee.” Again the very Soul of the ANC rests on this verse.

We are today one of the best organisations known to man because of these underlying values. People have always been able to depend on us, up and down the social spectrum.

That is why OR and Madiba would go on to build an organisation of men and women around the country who have become standard-bearers of all that is noble and just, even though they were jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice.

The ANC is made up of comrades who have toiled and continue to toil in organisations to relieve suffering.

The quiet acts of courage and compassion of millions of our supporters inspire neighbourhoods across the landscape. It is our members that give us the moral command we have had over the soul of this nation for over a century.

ANC members, along with other lovers of justice resolved not to be victims, but to free themselves and their oppressors from the burdens that all who practice injustice impose on themselves.

When apartheid power was at its worst, OR Tambo told a joint session of Parliament of Trinidad and Tobago, Port-of-Spain, that our alternative is a non-racial, united, democratic South Africa, in which the diversity of our people would be channelled to enrich and strengthen the common stream of our national endeavour.

And yet, to wrestle the brutalising effect of the monster that was apartheid, Madiba would tell us we need an “RDP of the soul”, the Reconstruction and Development of the soul. What would OR say if he saw us today? He certainly would be shocked that advocate Madonsela was even a factor for us. It is the ANC that had the historical obligation to be exemplary, even to the public protector.

He would be shocked that we have emboldened the opposition, going back and forth to courts of law, something an ANC leader could never imagine doing except for people’s justice; he would wonder how some opposition leaders today, given their intellectual shortcomings, would even begin to think they could contest the ANC on intellectual prowess. Speaking to Students at Georgetown University, Washington DC, January 27, 1987, OR said: “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.”

OR was a complete human being, morally, intellectually, and practically and although this served us well during the toughest times, today we need those values, and OR himself, more than ever.