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Comrade Chairman,
Members of the National Executive Committee,
Fellow Delegates,
We meet two days after Pretoria's assassination squads invaded the Republic of Botswana and murdered South Africans, among them members of the ANC, as well as citizens of Botswana and foreign nationals - men, women and children. Only last month the South African racists killed yet another comrade in Gaborone.
Today is June 16th, the ninth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising. The bloody repression that the Pretoria regime unleashed on that day continues. Inside our country, patriots are killed every day.
The moment has come when we should avenge these martyrs. The cause for which they perished will emerge victorious. The crime of apartheid which is responsible for their deaths must be suppressed. To honour their memory and in an act of rededication to the victory of the common cause, I request that we stand and observe a minute's silence.
Comrade Chairman,
It is indeed with great pleasure that I welcome all delegates to this historic National Consultative Conference of our movement. As I look round this hall, I can see that there are veterans who have been members of the ANC for anything up to half-a-century. There are others, young and dynamic, who reinforced our ranks a little more than half a decade ago.
Gathered here are professional revolutionaries, military commanders, commissars and cadres, diplomatic representatives, trade unionists, workers, peasants, royal persons, intellectuals and students, men and women. In this hall are present revolutionaries drawn from all the national groups of our country. We have come here from all corners of the globe, bringing with us our varied experiences, but united by a common and militant resolve to ensure that the 1980s do indeed become our Decade of Liberation.
What has convened here is more than a Conference of the ANC. It is nothing less than a South African National Congress, a true parliament of all the people of our country. Consequently, it carries on its shoulders serious responsibilities which are central to the future of our country.
It is no accident that our Conference takes place in the Republic of Zambia. Our host, the United National Independence Party, has been a friend and ally of our organisation for more than two decades now. When some of the comrades present here left home, UNIP took them through secretly, at a time when this country was still a British colony.
Since then, these fraternal relations have grown even stronger. Our common suffering in the struggle for the total liberation of Africa has cemented the unity of our organisations and peoples and produced a degree of mutual solidarity which those of our comrades who live and work in Zambia know has permeated through to the masses of this country.
We meet under these excellent conditions, thanks to a decision taken by His Excellency Comrade President Kenneth Kaunda and the Central Committee of UNIP, who, at very short notice, agreed without hesitation to our request to meet in Zambia. I am certain that Conference will agree that at the appropriate moment we should extend our heartfelt thanks to His Excellency President Kaunda and the Central Committee of UNIP.
The momentous importance of this occasion makes us feel all the more acutely the absence of comrades who are very dear to us and beloved among our people. I refer to the leaders and activists of our movement who are on Robben Island, Pollsmoor, Pretoria and Kroonstad, comrades who should have been with us as we meet here to discuss the future of our country and our people. We must and will surely ensure that next time we meet in Conference they too will be present as delegates.
Comrade Chairman,
The darkness that has shrouded our country for so long is now lit by flames that are consuming the accumulated refuse of centuries of colonialism and racism. For us, these flames are like beacons which draw us faster towards our goal. Botha prefers darkness and the night. But his nights are festivals of nightmares. All that his fearful eyes can see is a desolate road that ends in an abyss.
For our enemy, the age of illusion is coming to its ignoble end. The belief entertained for generations, that racial bigotry is an attribute of godliness, has come face to face with its own unique fate. The conviction that to be white was to be a missionary of civilisation, has given birth to a tidal wave whose strength will not abate until civilisation in our country is reckoned in the language of freedom and democracy. The pursuit of the certainties of a bygone age has itself become the gravedigger of fond hopes that injustice could be rationalised into a system of thought, implemented as a practice and imposed as a decree and be accepted by the victims of that injustice. Illusions closely held for many a year, that white minority rule would last an eternity, are stalking all the enclaves of white South Africa, proclaiming everywhere that, in fact, they are illusions, fleeting shadows without substance. The apartheid system is in crisis.
Our people want freedom now. They want to govern and determine the destiny of their country today and not tomorrow. They have lost patience with all ideas that their liberation can be postponed for any reason whatsoever. They measure the purpose of life by no other standard than that it should have been spent in the struggle for the liberation of our country. They have therefore shed all fear of death because the words to live have acquired the same meaning as the words to be free.
We who are gathered here are the trusted sons and daughters of these heroic masses. They sent us out of our country to commune with the nations of the world so that we could return to impart to them the revolutionary wisdom and skills of all those who had fought for freedom elsewhere in our universe. They knew that we would come back better prepared to promote the cause to which they are devoted and for whose success our forebears fought like the legendary titans. We who had a duty to teach are under an obligation to learn. Victory is knocking at the door. We have to absorb this lesson from the activities and sacrifices of our people. To absorb that lesson means to act now, and act in a decisive manner, to set our people free.
And so we have met today in a Congress of the democratic forces of our country to chart the path that will lead to the liberation of our people, today rather than tomorrow, sooner rather than later. That is the responsibility that rests on all of us today.
This is not an emergency conference to overcome a crisis within our movement. We are confronted by any crisis. We are meeting in a situation in which we have to determine how to use our advances at home and abroad to move further forward and to achieve victory. The challenges we face are ones that arise out of success. They impose on us the obligation to succeed even more, to succeed better and more quickly and to succeed to achieve victory. That is why, from the very beginning of the preparations of this Conference, our National Executive Committee sought to ensure that all of us should focus on the main task of elaborating ways and means for the intensification of the struggle for the victory of the national democratic revolution.
As we work to carry out this task, the masses of our people and the democratic movement of our country, afflicted by no doubts whatsoever, except that, after this Conference, they will see our movement take qualitatively new initiatives consonant with the situation that obtains in our country.
As they see that situation, and while it has sufficient forces to fight back, yet the enemy has arrived in the position where its defeat has become inevitable. On the other hand, while we have more than adequate forces to gain victory, this outcome will only be assured if we move now to mobilise and utilise these forces to sue for that victory.
As Conference will see from the messages that will be presented here, the international community is also watching our proceedings closely, in the expectation that as a result of our deliberations, the suppression of the apartheid crime against humanity will have become that much more imminent.
The scribes of the enemy of our people are today poised over countless notebooks. They have already written that our Conference was a failure and of no consequence to the future of our country. Their counterparts in the special services are also busy implementing plans whose results they intend to be used exactly as proof of how miserably this Conference aborted. Vigilance must be our watchword. Commitment to and focus on the task of freedom must be the factors that inspire us in our work, in keeping with the same degree of intensity with which our people and the world anti-apartheid movement pursue the goal of the liberation of our country and the permanent transformation of our region into a zone of peace.
May I wish you all a happy and fruitful stay in Zambia, and success in the work which confronts us. We extend our congratulations to you that you were selected as delegates to this important Conference, and express our confidence that you will carry out your tasks in a manner befitting our movement, our revolution and our times.
I declare the Second National Consultative Conference of the ANC open.