ANC President Tambo Returns to S. Africa After 30-Year Exile

Oliver R. Tambo, who stole out of South Africa in 1960 on a secret mission to rebuild the banned African National Congress in exile, returned home Thursday to a tumultuous welcome after three decades as external leader of the liberation movement.

The 73-year-old ANC president, appearing frail but smiling broadly, was greeted at the airport by a throng of ANC leaders, foreign ambassadors and anti-apartheid dignitaries. He later waved from an airport balcony to 5,000 singing, cheering supporters outside.

Nelson Mandela, the ANC’s deputy president and Tambo’s former law partner, told the crowd: “We welcome him with open arms as one of the greatest heroes of Africa.” Then the two men climbed into Mandela’s red Mercedes-Benz, and their motorcade departed with a police escort.

Tambo’s emotional return, on the eve of the ANC’s first national conference since the 1950s, was an important symbolic moment for the ANC, South Africa’s most powerful black political organization.

But it comes as the ANC faces serious organizational difficulties and growing unease over its decision to enter into talks with the white minority-led government of President Frederik W. de Klerk. Adding to its woes is a resurgence of black factional fighting that has claimed 220 lives in Johannesburg-area townships this month and 1,000 lives since July.

Some of those problems will be discussed, beginning today, by about 1,600 delegates to the ANC’s three-day national “consultative conference” in Johannesburg. Tambo and Mandela are scheduled to open the meeting, which will then move into closed session to discuss the ANC’s negotiating strategy, the future of sanctions and ongoing violence.

The meeting originally had been planned as a more important “national congress” to elect a new 37-member national executive committee. Many ANC members are unhappy with national executive members, some of whom have little contact with the organization’s membership.

However, that congress has been postponed until June, the ANC says, to allow exiles time to return to the country. The government has agreed to grant amnesty, on a case-by-case basis, to ANC members living abroad. But so far only a few hundred exiles have returned.

Nevertheless, the weekend conference will for the first time bring together the wide-ranging forces of the ANC, which De Klerk legalized on Feb. 2. Among those participating will be members of the underground military wing, former political prisoners, ANC international representatives and newly formed internal branches.

Tambo established the ANC’s exile headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, and led the guerrilla and diplomatic war with Pretoria during Mandela’s 27 years in jail. He was left partially paralyzed by a stroke in August, 1989, and has turned over most of the day-to-day affairs of the ANC to Mandela, although the two consult regularly.

Tambo is to remain in South Africa for three weeks, return to London with his wife, Adelaide, a nurse, and pack for the move here.

Some have suggested that Tambo’s illness may force him to step down as president, but ANC officials doubt that he will resign before the June congress, and they say he remains a key author of ANC strategy.

Many of the anti-apartheid leaders invited by the ANC to join Tambo’s reception committee Thursday said his return is a good omen for the country.

“This is a historic day for the whole of South Africa, black and white,” said Dullah Omar, a prominent anti-apartheid lawyer from Cape Town. “A great son of South Africa has returned.”

Helen Suzman, a liberal white politician who fought the government’s apartheid laws for years in Parliament, said she was delighted that Tambo was finally able “to return to his own country.”

“I have great admiration for his moderation and the manner in which he has managed to keep the ANC together as a viable organization,” Suzman added.

The government-supporting Citizen newspaper said Thursday that while it did not approve of Tambo’s role in the ANC’s guerrilla war, it welcomed him back “as a black nationalist leader who played a major role in . . . bringing about the changes that are transforming South Africa.”

BACKGROUND

The name of Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress, became a code word in South Africa for the idea that black people, gun in hand, could fight back against apartheid. Born in a farming family in Cape province on Oct. 25, 1917, Tambo was teaching science and mathematics in Johannesburg when he met young ANC militants, including Nelson Mandela. He was “banned” in 1954, and with Mandela and 154 others, charged with treason in 1956. All were acquitted. Days before the ANC was outlawed in 1960, Tambo left South Africa for what is now Botswana. He was appointed president of the ANC upon the death of Albert Luthuli in 1967. While his close friend Mandela languished in prison for nearly three decades, Tambo worked from exile in Britain and Zambia to coordinate the ANC’s guerrilla war, now suspended, and traveled the world to win support for the ANC cause and international sanctions against Pretoria.