13/05/2026
Repost from :
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“We might fail. But at the end of the day, we must be able to say that we have destroyed the apartheid system.”
Oliver Reginald Tambo (1917-1993) served as President of the African National Congress from 1967 until 1991, leading the organisation through three decades of exile after leaving South Africa following the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. He co-founded the ANC Youth League in 1944 alongside Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, and later established Mandela & Tambo, the first Black-owned law practice in South Africa. From headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, he directed the ANC’s international campaign to isolate the apartheid state, securing support from the Soviet Union, African states, and the global anti-apartheid movement.
This interview, conducted by Gill Nevil and first broadcast in November 1985 for Thames TV, was recorded three months after P.W. Botha’s government declared a State of Emergency across parts of South Africa, as township uprisings intensified and Umkhonto we Sizwe (the armed wing of the ANC) escalated operations inside the country. Mandela remained imprisoned. Earlier that year, Botha had offered his release on the condition he renounce violence. Mandela refused. Tambo speaks from Lusaka, twenty-five years into exile. Apartheid would not formally end until the elections of April 1994.
Oliver Tambo died on 24 April 1993.
