3 - The Nature of the Struggle Today: Article by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (attributed to Potlako Leballo), The Africanist, December 1957

Summary

There is as yet no common agreement between the Africanists and the present leadership of Congress together with its allies on the nature of the struggle. To the Africanists the struggle is both nationalist and democratic, in that it involves the restoration of the land to its rightful owners – the Africans – which fact immediately divides the combatants into the conquered and the conqueror, the invaded and the invader, the dispossessed and the dispossessor. That is a national struggle. It has nothing to do with numbers and laws. It is a fact of history. And both sides are each held together by a common history and are, in the struggle, carrying out the task imposed by history. That task is, for the whites, the maintenance and retention of the spoils passed on to them by their forefathers and, for the African, the overthrow of the foreign yoke and the reclamation of ‘the land of our fathers’. At the same time, our struggle is for democracy, if we understand democracy to mean the implementation of the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants of a country, as expressed in the laws of the country. A democratic struggle is essentially then, a recognition of NUMBERS, a National struggle is a struggle for the recognition of heritage. The Africans are in the fortunate position of being not only the rightful owners of the land but also the majority of the population. Our struggle, therefore, is democratic, involving as it does, the dispossessed majority against the privileged minority.

The ANC leadership and its allies are preoccupied with the latter aspect of the struggle – the democratic, to the total exclusion, nay even the open renunciation and denunciation, of the Nationalistic. And from that difference in our conception of the struggle, stem the differences in tactics and interpretation of events.

The forces involved in the struggle

Because we differ from the leadership in our conception of the nature of the struggle, we differ in our assessment of the forces for and against us. The Congress leadership, because it interprets the struggle as one for democracy and therefore a political struggle, designed to remove legal restrictions, recognises the foe as the present Nationalist government and accepts and treats everybody opposed to the Nationalist government whatever his motives and beliefs, as an ally.