Leadership Quote by Oliver Tambo

Tambo’s line refuses the comfortable fiction that apartheid was merely a matter of prejudice or “separate development.” He welds together what the regime worked hard to keep rhetorically separate: race, wealth, and the machinery of extraction. The phrase “part and parcel” is doing quiet but brutal work here. It’s idiomatic, almost casual, which makes the claim sound like common sense rather than a manifesto: of course discrimination and economic power belong to the same system. That simplicity is strategic. It strips apartheid of its alibis and reclassifies it as an economic project with a racial operating system.

The sequencing matters, too. “Racial discrimination” comes first, the moral offense most outsiders can recognize; “South Africa’s economic power” follows as the payoff; then “oppression and exploitation” land as the method. Tambo is building a chain of causation, not offering a list. If the country is prosperous, he implies, we should ask: prosperous for whom, and at what price?

Context sharpens the intent. As ANC president in exile during the apartheid era, Tambo was speaking to multiple audiences at once: to black South Africans who experienced the daily reality of pass laws, migrant labor, and dispossession; and to international governments and corporations tempted to treat apartheid as an internal social problem rather than a global business arrangement. The subtext is a demand: you cannot oppose apartheid while profiting from it. Sanctions, divestment, and solidarity aren’t symbolic gestures in his framing; they’re the logical response to a system whose economics and racism are inseparable.