Читать книгу Learning from Robben Island - Govan Mbeki - Страница 6

All of us endorse fully the reply made by Nelson Mandela [February 1985] to your offer of a conditional release. In doing so we would like to emphasise that our organisation, the African National Congress, was founded on the policy of non-violence in its search for freedom for the oppressed people of South Africa. This policy of non-violence was borne out by almost fifty years’ record of peaceful struggle.

With the coming into power of the National Party in 1948, the ANC was subjected to all forms of harassment by the police. It was the NP government that set up, for the first time in South Africa, a special branch of the police, similar to the secret police of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Our leaders were subjected to police harassment and many of them were banned, house-arrested or banished to remote areas of the country.

The reign of the National Party saw the worst forms of racism in the country. The bloodbaths of Sharpeville and Langa stand as a ghastly record of NP rule by the gun. When the ANC decided to protest against the blood-letting on 28 March 1960 by destroying the pass – that badge of bondage – the NP government replied by banning our Organisation. The peaceful protest of the people against the declaration of a Republic, without a mandate from the people of South Africa, in May 1961, was visited with police mass raids and the mobilisation of the army.

All this showed clearly that the NP government did not countenance any opposition by the oppressed to its apartheid regime. When it should have heeded the just and democratic demands of the people, the NP government went ahead with the implementation of the Bantustans and Urban Bantu Councils, which were established on the same model as the ghetto Jewish authorities under Nazi Germany.

Even the longest road has a turning. The oppressed had to decide whether they were to live and perish on their knees or stand up and fight rather than surrender.

You, Mr President, are now saying we must desert our people and all that we have lived for; we must desert what our people are struggling for at this very moment. You say we must undertake not to be arrested again. Who of the oppressed black people and democratic white people can escape the wide dragnet of the draconian apartheid laws?

Only those who have sold their souls can imagine they are safe; only the puppets can imagine they are safe. The vast minefield of apartheid laws makes your offer a mockery. It is patently clear that you do not intend your offer to be accepted by an organisation as principled as the ANC is. Your offer is intended to provide your imperialist friends with a pretext to continue to support the National Party regime.

Our people are today dying daily of police bullets in the townships. School children are undergoing the rigours of indefinite detentions. All this takes place despite the fact that we are arrested and kept away for more than twenty years. It is clear therefore that it is apartheid that is the cause of all this violence in our country. It is apartheid that must be renounced and dismantled if there is to be peace in this country.

[September 1985]