TRANSCRIPT: THE OXYGEN FOR BEING HUMAN
You could see straight away Nelson Mandela was a leader. His posture, his way of speaking, the fact that he was the tallest person of all the 156 accused in the Treason Trial in that amazing picture by Eli Weinberg. You see this beautifully attired figure standing out. You’d never say at first sight Oliver Tambo was a leader. You discovered, you learnt about his leadership qualities over time, interacting with him. They made a marvellous partnership.
Now I’m living in exile in Mozambique. Helping to build up the legal system, professor at the university there, in the law school. But flown from time to time to Lusaka to help the ANC headquarters there with different projects. It was quite a journey from the airport down into town, down a sanitary lane where the rubbish carts used to go. A gate, a back entrance, a small house. My friend Wolfie Kodesh used to worry; he said a sniper could just be out in the sanitary lane with a gun. The door opens, they could get Oliver Tambo in his office. It’s a very hot climate. The fans going around. I remember once, he rolls up a newspaper and he’s swatting flies. And I’m feeling the leader of the revolutionary struggle in South Africa shouldn’t be swatting flies. I don’t know who else was supposed to do it. But it just looked so modest and so incongruous, given the role that he had. And yet he never felt uncomfortable, you know, in that role. And he saw it as accepting a service, a mantle. Not a crown, a mantle. The mantle of the predecessors who’d been leaders of the ANC.
And I remember, once when I was flying in, I had a question that had been asked to me in Mozambique by Pam dos Santos. She’s a South African who was married to the then vice president of Mozambique, Marcelino dos Santos, one of the great FRELIMO leaders. And she said, ‘You know, Albie, that top leadership in Mozambique want to know, who is the top leader of the South African struggle? Is it Nelson Mandela or is it Oliver Tambo?’ Now, we never asked that question, but they wanted to know. Samora Machel was their top leader. And boy, did he lead. He was president of FRELIMO. He was president of their parliament. He was the head of the Central Committee. He was president of the army. And in a way, it symbolised unity in the nation. It symbolised that focus on the ideas of Samora Machel. We’d never asked that question. So, I asked him. Immediately, he said to me, ‘Nelson Mandela, he’s the commander in chief.’ I don’t think, legally, he was correct actually – from a purely technical point of view. But he was very quick to say, ‘Nelson Mandela’ – locked up, then, on Robben Island – ‘is the top leader of the ANC.’ Years later, when Mandela comes out of prison, goes up to Zambia, and I had a moment with him, I mentioned this question that had been asked in Mozambique. And straight away, he said, ‘Oliver Tambo.’ Straight away. They absolutely loved each other and supported each other and respected each other.
When the soldiers went to cross the Zambezi River into what was then Rhodesia, thinking they would get to South Africa and lift the armed struggle in South Africa, Tambo – I was told by one of them – went with them to the river’s edge. They had to go down quite a steep slope, and he went down with them. Now, he was a pacifist at heart. He believed in peace. It was part of his religious understanding. But the soldiers, now, are being sent by him, maybe to meet their death and also to kill others. And he felt he can’t just say, ‘Bye-bye, good luck.’ He had to go with them down to the river’s edge, even although it was dangerous to do that.
It all came from him – that spontaneous sense of…of goodness, of right, of, of decency and dignity. And very proud to be an African. And you felt that pride, you felt that confidence. It just came from inside, through the clarity of his exposition. I used to say, some speakers are powerful through the force of their oratory. It wasn’t his oratory. Sometimes we’d wish he would be more powerful. It was the strength of his ideas that would come through. There was just that element of rightness, of conviction. Yes, yes, clear. As though the thought comes from inside, passes his heart to get the oxygen for being human, and then goes through his brain and comes out as language that, that has that sense of justice and rationality, and fairness incorporated in it.
And there was something about the way he worked that made you always feel you are a volunteer with him, not a subordinate, and that you’re being embraced by him in this broader struggle that we’re all committed to. He was always very… exceptionally considerate is the word I’d use, in the way he would ask you to look at things and, you know, ‘Could you help us?’ And ‘it would be appreciated very much if you can.’ ‘We can discuss,’ and so on. It was never like a command, ‘do this, do that.’
He was very meticulous on getting exactly the right phrasing. Words have meanings. Words have to be used carefully because they have consequences. People hated being his speech writers. It was never perfect enough for him. There’s a story that even the letters from his children, he would correct so that they would write better the next time. I remember one day in Maputo; it was about midnight, and I see Chris Hani running down the street. ‘Hey, Chris, yeah, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘We’ve been working as a team with O.R. on some document for about five hours now. We had a break and I’m not going back.’ Now, Chris never ran away from anything. He faced battle. But he ran away from being one of the speech writers.
And I felt so close to Tambo. It’s not with the same philosophical framework. In a sense, he was my total opposite. With him, it was Christianity. It related to Jesus. He’d grown up in a rural area in the Transkei, connected with the soil, with growing things, with cattle, become religious at an early age. Deeply religious. He had scars given to him as part of his growing up. Very much an African nationalist. With me, it was a whole different set of principles of growing up in a revolutionary family, where the essence of your life is connected with the essence of the lives of others, and humanity and liberation. I grew up in Cape Town, very cosmopolitan. My mother, the typist for Moses Kotane, General Secretary of the Communist Party. Internationalist; by the beach. And my parents had fought their parents over religion. So, I’m growing up in a very secular world, which interestingly made me hugely respectful of the religious beliefs of others. For me, conscience is number one. Before food, before speech, before anything else, is conscience. It’s, it’s the most elemental aspect of a human being. And I discovered we actually had quite a lot in common. It was the balance between – if you like – conscience, rationality, heart, emotion. Very, very similar. We’re both soft. Soft people, pacifists at heart. I think every struggle needs hard people and strong people and robust, determined people. But I think every struggle needs soft people as well. It’s unusual for the soft person to become the top leader.
And I’d be invited to come up and help with different projects. He would call me in. And I would feel so honoured and, and so delighted. And not only enjoying his mind but enjoying the embrace that I got, intellectual embrace. One was on upgrading the statutes of the ANC. I’m a lawyer. I can help with the legal language. And it was Oliver Tambo who drafted the statutes in the late 1950s when Chief Luthuli, Albert Luthuli was the president. He was the secretary general. Now it’s maybe the late 1970s, early 1980s. Can I help upgrade? I spent several days helping with the drafting. I remember asking him, ‘It’s rather complicated but we need a clause for what happens when the president dies, or the acting president dies.’ He insisted on being called the acting president, never president. He said, ‘Only a conference of the ANC on South African soil can choose the president. I’m just acting in the meanwhile.’
The most important work I did with him, without doubt, was drafting the Code of Conduct for the ANC in exile. I remember arriving at his office through the sanitary lane. And there he is swatting the flies. And he says, ‘We have a problem. We have a number of captives and enemy agents sent to destroy the organisation. There’s nothing in our constitution that deals with how you deal with captured enemy agents.’ And jaunty, I say, ‘Well, you know, the international instruments say no inhuman, degrading punishment or treatment, no torture.’ He says, ‘We use torture.’ We use torture… I can’t believe it. We’re fighting for freedom. We use torture. He says, ‘Well, let’s see if we can draft something using the international instruments as a foundation.’ I only learned afterwards that he’d got information about great brutalities in ANC camps. He didn’t tell me at the time. And without doubt, the most important legal document I drafted in my life, and I helped with the writing of the South African Constitution, I wrote judgements on same-sex marriages, capital punishment. The most important document was that Code of Conduct. Legality inside the ANC.
I remember, one young guy came to me once. He was uMkhonto weSizwe, he was in Maputo. He said, ‘_Comrade Albie, when you join the ANC, do you still have right_s?’ I was kind of surprised, you know, he’s asking that question. I said, ‘I don’t know. We don’t think of it in those ways.’ But he was concerned about ill-treatment. And now that issue was being raised very pertinently. And we drafted a code of conduct that provided for if anybody was alleged to have been a spy or an agent, they must have a trial. They must have defence. They must have charges. They must have the right to call witnesses. But it wasn’t just that. It was also people who stabbed, who stole from the organisation, sexual assaults, doing things that were wrong. How do we deal with them? Living in exile, half the people in camps in different areas. The host country saying you deal with your own problems. We’ve got enough in our own courts. And we said, ‘No torture. No torture.’
So, that became a very important source of thinking about, what does it mean to be a revolutionary? It can mean you’re fighting a glorious struggle to destroy a vicious enemy and open the way to a beautiful life for everybody. It can mean you want to transform society. You want to make life different for everybody. It can mean your morality must be deeper, more profound, more meaningful than anybody else’s – because you’re dealing with the use of power, and power can be used in terrible ways to do terrible things. And with Tambo, it was clearly the second aspect.
