Landing+with+gratitude+at+OR+Tambo,+Karima+Brown,+B+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 05 September 2006
=Landing with gratitude at OR Tambo International=


 * Karima Brown**

I WILL be proud to fly home and land at the OR Tambo International Airport.

Like most sane South Africans I support efforts by government finally to honour Tambo’s legacy and acknowledge his role in fighting apartheid colonialism.

In this context I fail to understand the reaction of our opposition parties over the renaming of Johannesburg International Airport to honour Tambo. I doubt that the leaders and MPs of the Democratic Alliance, the Freedom Front Plus and the Pan Africanist Congress are unaware of Tambo’s role in our history and his influence in shaping our future.

But for those who do not know, do yourselves a favour, go and read up on the history of SA. You may yet emerge from your history lesson convinced that Tambo was the most accomplished political leader SA has ever produced, bar none. He played a seminal role and made an invaluable contribution — not only to the ruling party but to SA as a whole.

Whether one is a member of the African National Congress (ANC) or not, we must never forget Tambo’s place in our history. He is the leader who kept the leading liberation movement and its alliance together under the very difficult conditions of illegality and exile. He maintained the organisational integrity of an ANC that was plagued by ideological divisions, infiltrated by agents of the apartheid state, and that had no presence at home for a period of 30 years. Ultimately he was able to guide it towards negotiations with the apartheid government when the time was right.

He loomed large as a figure on the international stage, regardless of the fact that in its apartheid stupor, white SA either knew nothing about him or branded him a terrorist. Tambo straddled the two sides of the Cold War, a formidable ideological and political divide, and made the ANC acceptable to both sides of the fence. When right-wing governments in the west faltered or actively tried to undermine the global consensus against apartheid, Tambo brought them into line.

In one of his great foreign policy coups, he defeated Ronald Reagan’s apartheid-supporting White House, and civil pressure eventually led to the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act by the US congress in 1986. This was the beginning of global economic sanctions against PW Botha’s government, and the beginning of the end for apartheid.

Tambo was thus a great foreign-policy president long before President Thabo Mbeki. This comparison is not as out of place as it might first seem. Under Tambo, the ANC was a government in exile. It operated more overseas missions and enjoyed greater diplomatic legitimacy than did the South African state.

In the end, Tambo gave his life to all of us, working himself into an early grave and robbing himself of the fruits of his own labour.

Some, ignorant of this history, have suggested the airport be named after the iconic Nelson Mandela. There are two problems with this suggestion. First, just because Tambo never enjoyed the media renown that Madiba has, it says nothing about his role. Anyone who was anyone in global politics over the last four decades of the 20th century knows the name of OR Tambo. Second, the airport in Port Elizabeth has Mandela’s name by virtue of serving a metro named after him.

As a nation, we gain nothing from those who suggest that only Madiba among our leaders is good enough to have our landmarks renamed in his honour. This trend has descended to a level that is ridiculous and opportunistic, such as the changing of the name of Sandton Square, a site of crude consumerism that has nothing to do with Mandela’s legacy, to Nelson Mandela Square, and the erection of a grotesque statue there in his “honour”.

The unnecessary furore around Tambo may ultimately force the ruling party to rethink its own brand of revisionism. The ANC has shown poor form in renaming SA’s cities, towns and landmarks. Our new rulers have practised victors’ justice. A good example is the renaming of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s medical school as the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine. I have always wondered why Mandela was honoured at this institution, which is in fact the alma mater of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. Mandela studied at Wits law school, which was rightly renamed for him.

When is the ANC government going to acknowledge the role of antiapartheid activists, politicians and leaders who were either not members of the party or who left its ranks? Where are the tributes to Biko, Robert Sobukwe, Imam Abdullah Haroon, Helen Suzman and others who fought the good fight outside the congress movement?

Be magnanimous in victory and you’ll find that no one has a problem with naming a permanent construction site after Oliver Tambo.


 * Brown is political editor.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A264994**

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