Oliver Tambo’s Dream

I think I can say with great degree of confidence that the most remarkable legal partnership in any country, anywhere in the world, anytime, was the partnership of Mandela and Tambo. And why do I make this bold claim? It's because they broke the law, in a way that no other lawyers had broken the law, to recreate the law. And they were a younger generation. Our top leaders were Albert Luthuli, Yusuf Dadu and Walter Sisulu of an older generation. These were the middle generation. Nelson Mandela: passionate, fiery, vigorous; he was asked to join uMkhonto we Sizwe, the underground resistance in South Africa. Oliver Tambo was sent out to get international support to isolate South Africa, to keep the ANC together and to get sanctions imposed. Each did his job in his sphere in a magnificent way, with style, with energy, with resolution, with thoughtfulness, with dignity. And they stayed the course all the way through. They represented a continuity of endeavor, of principled organisation, of finding allies wherever possible, of isolating the enemy, the opposition, and enlarging the scale of the people involved in the resistance, and being utterly, totally unafraid; unafraid to speak the truth, unafraid to fight powers that were very, very powerful; but they were flexible and thoughtful and responsive to changing conditions and changing needs.

And so I'm so proud looking back on my own history: this young, idealistic lawyer, Albie Sachs, from a very different background, and benefiting so much from having leaders of that quality and style who truly represented the nation in excellent ways, and then helped to reconfigure the very notion of civilisation – that civilisation wasn't the white man with all his airs and graces and capacity for cruelty with a smile. The civilised human being was Nelson Mandela, after 27 years in jail, coming out and saying, ‘How can we build the country now?’ The civilised human being was Oliver Tambo with that intense internal kindness and generosity of spirit, and open arms, and thoughtfulness, and creativity. They helped to reconfigure the nature of revolutionary leadership and the nature of what political beings could be like, persons with humanity, and grace, and warmth, and intelligence, and laughter, and compassion.

I had an interesting connection with them, in a way quite personal. The first was completely unexpected. I joined the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign as a 17-year-old, second year law student; volunteer number 8942, or something like that, and I discover volunteer number one is a certain Nelson Mandela who happens to be a lawyer. I had never heard of him before that, but we are connected by the struggle. I used to say afterwards, ‘What's the one good thing apartheid did?’, and people get worried, as if I'm going to say colonialism at least brought railways and stuff like that. The one good thing apartheid did was create anti-apartheid, and that enabled me to be connected.

As a law student, when I went to Johannesburg during vacation time, I would always drop into the office of Mandela and Tambo, and I'd be offered a cup of tea by the office manager. I would meet the one partner or the other. How's the struggle doing in Cape Town? It was just a beautiful embrace on their part, and it was an acknowledgement, on my part, of their role.

Later in exile, I worked very closely with Oliver Tambo when I moved to Maputo, which is fairly close to Lusaka. I helped with the creation of a code of conduct for the ANC, to prevent the use of torture against captured enemy agents. I helped with redrafting the statutes to upgrade them, and he appointed me, together with many others, to the Constitutional Committee to prepare for a new constitutional order in South Africa. He played a magnificent guiding role in our work, with a sense of timing, a sense of getting things right and giving his own vision and words very late in the day; he didn't want us to think ‘Now, what does our president think?’ and ‘How can we please our president?’ On the contrary, he wanted to keep back and let us work, talk, engage, fight with others, and when we've got something ready right at the end, he will make his impact, put on his imprint. It was remarkable. Very interesting things were happening, and a special bond emerged between us.

He was deeply religious. He was planning to marry Adelaide, his partner, in December 1956 and to become ordained as an Anglican priest. Instead, he was raided. I also happened to be raided at that time. He was put on trial for treason. I was kept in reserve. And he felt providence had a different destiny for him. But when he came to prepare a speech for a world conference on religion in London, he came to me to help him write it, and not to the religious desk. He wanted something soulful, something deeply humane and spiritual, that he would feel as a Christian African nationalist, and I would feel as a secular freedom fighter. It was easy for me to find words that could feed in. I think he felt it was enriching what he had to say. So, there was a kind of tender bond between us.

I think there was another connection – softness. Struggles need hard, tough people. They need the iron, they need the resolution, the forcefulness. But struggles also need soft people, and he was a soft person in his bearing. He's dealing with people in his thought, even in his voice, and I see myself as a soft person. I think we felt an intuitive connection in that sense. If there's something resolute and steely, it's not in manner, it's not in style, it's not in our vocal and physical presentation; it's more in a sense of anchoring everything with deep foundations of ideals and meaningful principles. In his case, meaningful in terms of a life of the hereafter, in my case, meaningful in terms of a life that ends when it’s over and I'm gone.

When I was elected to the National Executive of the ANC in 1991, I came up onto the platform, and he’d had a stroke and was weak, but he was there, and everybody was cheering, and I lifted the missing arm I always raised, in this moment of symbolic of acknowledgement of what’s happening. I got onto the platform, and he wanted to greet me, but his right arm, I think, was paralysed, and my right arm was missing, and I had to kind of lean forward, and he kissed my hand to express that tenderness.

So, I tell the story, to say why, when the centennial of his birth was commemorated in the country, I felt I must speak; I must tell people. Mandela, known almost over; known to a point of adulation, and then often a point of repudiation. Oliver Tambo, a name from the past, virtually unknown. I decided to speak at four different universities. University of Pretoria, University of Cape Town, University Western Cape and Stellenbosch University. It was a different theme for each one, and I felt so proud and so connected, and there was so much I was conveying. Not speaking as a praise singer but speaking as somebody who worked closely with Tambo and benefited from him; borrowed so much from him. I came from that revolutionary socialist internationalist background, very cosmopolitan, very important for me. He represented another world; very African, in a way rural, traditional in manner and style, deeply influenced by Christianity, and very aware that he was heir to a tradition of leaders of the ANC, and he's carrying that responsibility through the generations, from the past to the future. He helped, in that sense, to Africanise me in ways that were enormously beneficial. In fact, when I went to Canada for the first time after the bomb, before we got democracy, the ANC representative in Ottawa was very amusing. He said, ‘Albie the Boers have Africanised you; you've got scars like Oliver Tambo.’ And I felt fantastic. I wanted to have scars like Oliver Tambo. And if I'm on TV, don't paint out the scars, I’m really proud of those scars.

So, four lectures, they’re recorded, they’re transcribed, I make certain corrections, and I think they will make a book. At a memorial for a former friend of mine, whom I loved very much, André Odendaal was attending. As an historian, he had worked on the papers of Lionel Forman, who'd been an advocate ahead of me, and who influenced me in style, and manner, and humour, and a whole range of different things. I spoke to André about publishing the book, and he put the book together. He found this terrific picture of the younger, bright Oliver Tambo. And the scars are picked up, even in the aspects of the design. The book was quickly, and cost effectively produced and bought by law schools for first year law students to read, and a second edition was printed. It's a book that I give out quite generously wherever I go. It captures a lot of my life as somebody who learned so much from the struggle, and when I inscribe the book, I always say ‘Oliver Tambo’s Dream, which is still our dream.’