Adelaide Tambo appears on stage at the Dance Mandela Concert, Brixton Academy, London , United Kingdom, 1990. (Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)
Remembered as a woman of substance and beauty by her daughter Tselane, Adelaide Tambo’s memory continues to be present in the imagination of many South Africans. Adelaide valued education, excellence and debate. The value of education was at the core of Adelaide’s project for liberation and emancipation of black people. She believed that good-quality education could inculcate critical thinkers with sharp reasoning skills to speak back and critique unjust oppressive laws and systems.
Her passion for critical reasoning can be traced back to her involvement in debating societies while at school where she and other learners used the platform to debate, reflect and critically discuss the various oppressive laws put in place by the apartheid regime and ways in which they could respond to this inhumane treatment of people.
Debating is important as it allows for consideration of views from various angles and the ability to scrutinise and empathise where an opponent is coming from and reach well-thought out and, ideally, fair conclusions. These debating skills became useful when Adelaide took on leadership roles in the liberation movement.
Affirmative argument for servant leadership
Adelaide’s passion for debate and how debating can be used as a tool to engender critical reasoning, fair engagement and the opening up of platforms for diverse views is an important lesson for how leadership can be reimagined. At a time when the idea of ethical leadership and creating caring working environments continues to be a challenge, drawing a leaf from Adelaide’s book of wisdom can go a long way in our endeavours for social justice.
Highlighting Adelaide’s awareness for social justice, scholars such as Gail Furman argue that to succeed in doing transformative work, leaders ought to have an intense awareness of oppression, exclusion and marginalisation. For this reason, it is critical to make connections between social justice leadership and servant leadership.
Liberation heroes and heroines such as Adelaide Tambo leave us with the legacy of servant leadership and putting people first, the “Batho pele” principles. In response to a media interview question about how she would like to be remembered, Adelaide responded: “As a servant of my people.”
We can look back and see how Adelaide’s leadership style has been consistent over time — after the Sharpeville massacre in 1969 when the ANC was banned in South Africa, she moved to London, whereas her husband Oliver Tambo went to Zambia. They sacrificed living together as a couple and a family in service to their people. The couple lived apart for 30 years and could only visit one another two or three times a year. While in exile, she raised awareness in London of the injustice plaguing South Africans, particularly black women and children under the oppressive apartheid regime. Even after that, her commitment to the emancipation of her people did not waiver.
Adelaide’s actions are in line with what many scholars refer to as servant-leadership, which is used to describe the type of leader that prioritises being of service to their community before leading them. It is the kind of leadership that abandons individual needs and individualism in service to their communities.
Adelaide’s servant-leadership towards marginalised communities under the apartheid state traversed to serving those who were close to her heart and in society’s margins, such as the elderly and children living with disabilities. Adelaide strongly believed in serving all members of society equally, regardless of their socio-economic status.
Adelaide’s commanding personality was sometimes described as intimidating. She could get results and was highly regarded by the diplomatic corps. Her leadership qualities were admired by many. She exhibited what scholar Dr Babalwa Magoqwana calls “inimba” which she describes as an attribute of African women’s leadership. Inimba is a useful leadership tool that all members of society can utilise and learn from. It means “life giving, life-sustaining and life-preserving” and also serves as a tool to deconstruct the prevailing patriarchal disparities that continue to exist in our country.
The principles of inimba can be seen in Adelaide’s position on the importance of women within the struggle, politically and socially, and the need for a drastic change in the conditions in which women lived — and continue to live. Adelaide reminds us that: “African women do not need a speaker’s class. They have enough experiences of oppression under apartheid that they can articulate without difficulty.”
It is not surprising that Adelaide was among the 20 000 women who, on 9 August 1956, marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria. The women were at the forefront of critiquing the apartheid government’s unjust laws. Frene Ginwala underscores that it was relatively easy to garner support to mobilise other women who shared similar struggles. In addition, Nomboniso Gasa asserts that these women defied both the apartheid state and the men of the liberation movements as they embarked on one of South Africa’s most iconic marches.
Despite the oppressive, patriarchal political spaces in which the many women, including Adelaide, worked (for example, working underground, waging war against the apartheid regime), they were not passive victims of their circumstances. As an obituary in The Independent stated, Adelaide, together and alongside other struggle heroines, “elevated the roles of wife and mother … and influenced change within the ANC that was at the time dominated by the ambitions of macho ex-guerrillas”.
Looking back is important because it allows us to reflect on the social injustices plaguing contemporary South Africans. One only need page through newspapers or social media pages to see how corruption has eaten and continues to eat away at the very fabric of our society. We live in a society where the notion of consciousness and the plight of the needy seem to fall on deaf ears, a society where grandmothers live in fear of being attacked in the streets and their homes by the youth of their own communities – the moral fibre of our communities has been deeply fractured.
For Ma Adelaide, the elderly people were close to her heart and she worked tirelessly to create safety zones for them – she acknowledged the important role our elders play in the wellbeing of society.
The life events of Ma Adelaide and the values that she upheld encourage us to start where we are — at the grassroots level, to make the changes we would like to see in our communities. To quote her prophetic words upon her return from exile: “The future of the country is in our hands … Let’s take up the challenge.”