Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains
By Luli Callinicos
(David Phillip)
It is ironic that, of all the great struggle heroes of South Africa, the one least examined has been Oliver Reginald Tambo (OR to his friends and comrades). Luli Callinicos’s biography redresses that omission. The leader of the African National Congress during the exile period, Tambo kept the movement together, and his essentially moral vision was a major factor in giving the African National Congress not only the political but moral high ground.
Callinicos follows Tambo’s life from rural childhood through exile to death. A devout Anglican, he seriously considered whether he had a vocation to the priesthood. In 1956, the year in which he married Adelaide Tsukhudu, he was also accepted as a candidate for Anglican orders.
But wider political events intervened. In 1956 Tambo and 155 others were arrested and charged with treason. Although none were convicted, by the end of 1960 the ANC was banned and Tambo went into exile. Setting up the ANC in exile was an enormous task, entailing huge diplomatic efforts, supporting, educating and feeding exiles, creating safe houses, generating public opinion, and training Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) guerrillas.
Tambo saw the need to keep all sectors of the movement unified. There were many difficulties: tensions between communists and non-communists; ongoing debates on the role of non-Africans; questions over which movements in South Africa to support; what levels of force MK should use.
Callinicos details all this, as well as how how Tambo’s leadership style affected their outcomes. Unlike Mandela, who tended to pitch into debates at the outset and make his position clear, Tambo, by nature an unassuming person, would listen to all sides and then reach consensus. Perhaps a measure of his deep Christian faith, he was a reconciler.
Inclusion rather than exclusion was his guiding vision, a vision that, at best, helped the ANC to avoid ideological fragmentation. The role was taxing on Tambo. He had never aspired to be leader of the ANC. He was also deeply distressed by the escalating violence of the 1970s and 1980s. Such pressures took a terrible toll. He could not have a normal family life, and the strain wrecked his health. By the time the ANC was unbanned in 1990, Tambo was very ill. He died of a heart attack in Johannesburg in 1993. At his funeral, Nelson Mandela likened him to the biblical Moses, who died just before his people entered the Promised Land.
Drawing with consummate skill on a highly impressive array of interviews and secondary sources, Callinicos’s research (more than 10 years’ work), offers not only a much-needed account of Tambo’s life but also an inside look at how the ANC not only survived but finally triumphed. Though clearly sympathetic to her subject, she includes the views of Tambo’s critics and opponents. Significantly, even the latter treat him with respect.
Later biographies will doubtless engage in more critical debate about issues such as whether Tambo’s leadership style slowed down the revolutionary process. Others may see in what looks like a “great man” approach to history-writing as undermining a view of the ANC’s strength of collective leadership. Still others might object that the author has overemphasised parts of Tambo’s life and not examined enough other areas (not least his last years). Such questions will be raised, in some cases with justification, but they should not detract from Callinicos’s achievement.
This is an excellent biography. Callinicos manages to present not only the public figure but also the human being.