Leadership Quote by Oliver Tambo

Tambo’s line is a cold-blooded diagnosis of how injustice survives: not because it’s misunderstood, but because it pays. The most striking move is his conditional, almost polite phrasing, “It may be,” which reads less like uncertainty than a rhetorical trap. He grants the listener an escape hatch of doubt, then quietly shuts it by naming what polite diplomacy prefers not to: apartheid’s “stupendous economic advantages” were not incidental, they were the system’s engine.

The subtext is aimed past South Africa’s white regime and toward the international actors who insisted on condemning apartheid while continuing to profit from it. By framing apartheid as an option countries might “sooner have” than see dismantled, Tambo implicates Western governments, corporations, and trading partners in a shared cost-benefit calculation. Moral language is revealed as a kind of camouflage; the real question is what people will tolerate when their balance sheets are comfortable.

Context matters: as an ANC leader in exile, Tambo spent years lobbying for sanctions and isolating the apartheid state. This sentence functions as both accusation and strategy. It pressures outsiders to admit that neutrality is a position with dividends, and it reframes “engagement” as complicity unless it threatens the profits underwriting oppression. The line works because it refuses sentimental appeals; it treats apartheid as a business model. Once you accept that premise, reform becomes less a plea for conscience than a demand for consequences.