Tambo’s Violence Advocacy Discomfits CSUN Audience

The students were used to hearing about the need to fight social injustice without violence. Martin Luther King Jr. preached that. So does Bishop Desmond Tutu.

So when South African black nationalist Oliver Tambo advocated the violent overthrow of his country’s apartheid-rule government before an audience of about 800 at California State University, Northridge on Tuesday, many students were uneasy.

“We are involved in an armed struggle,” said Tambo, exiled leader of the African National Congress. “The people of South Africa are ready to stand up to the oppressions of the Pretoria regime, and they are ready to fight back.”

That Tambo spoke in such strong terms should have come as no surprise, as he has been preaching the same message on a speaking tour of the United States. After a meeting with Tambo last week that drew criticism from conservatives, Secretary of State George P. Shultz warned that the use of violence to combat the apartheid system of racial segregation would lead to catastrophe.

In a speech marking the opening of CSUN’s Black History Month celebration, Tambo said that, from 1976 to 1986, the African National Congress has been responsible for 80 deaths in South Africa, whereas the government has killed 2,400 people in the last two years.

‘Unspeakable Dimensions’

“There will be more lives lost,” he told the hushed CSUN crowd. “Not just 80 in 10 years, but many more. The escalation will proceed to unspeakable dimensions.”

The South African leader received a standing ovation when he began his talk, and was interrupted several times by loud applause. But some in the audience were quick to disagree with his advocacy of violence.

“I think apartheid is absolutely horrible and terrible and something that should be done away with as soon as possible, but the manner in which he is going about it is wrong,” Linda Boughn, a graduate student of art history, said after Tambo’s speech. “Perhaps he doesn’t understand exactly how much the bureaucracy can change.”

Desmond Blackburn, a freshman broadcast journalism major and vice president of the CSUN Black Student, said he was “awed” by Tambo, but not his tactics.

“In my own opinion, violence never works,” Blackburn said. “But if it will continue and save the struggle to abolish apartheid, I guess no risk is too high.”

In the past two years, violence in South Africa has escalated as black militants have assassinated blacks with ties to the white regime and have planted bombs in white areas.

Entertainer and social activist Harry Belafonte, a surprise speaker who took the lectern just before Tambo, said that a policy of non-violence was successful in America’s civil rights struggle, but not in South Africa.

“The essential difference between the two societies is that, in the United States, racists broke the laws and, in South Africa, racists made the laws,” Belafonte said.

Cautioned Against Propaganda

Tambo cautioned CSUN students against believing in the “propaganda” of South African President Pieter W. Botha, who has tried to paint the ANC as a communist-backed organization. In his meeting with Tambo, Shultz expressed the Reagan Administration’s concern over Soviet influence on the militant anti-apartheid group.

“The Soviet Union was a very useful ally in the defeat of Nazi Germany,” the soft-spoken Tambo said. Then he drew a round of applause by adding, “We are fighting the successor of Hitler in South Africa.”