Leadership Quote by Oliver Tambo

Tambo’s line is a recruitment pitch disguised as a moral benediction: once you have seen the truth of apartheid, you’re no longer a spectator. “Power” here isn’t the swagger of weapons or office; it’s the leverage that comes from moral clarity, especially when that clarity is hard-won. He’s speaking to outsiders as much as to South Africans, wagering that knowledge creates obligation. If you “discover” racism’s machinery, you inherit a duty to dismantle it.

The phrasing carries the careful pragmatism of a liberation politician who spent years in exile building international alliances. “Our part of the world” is modest on the surface, but it’s also strategic: he narrows the ask (help us remake this corner) while widening the stake (so all humanity can be proud). That pivot turns anti-apartheid from a local grievance into a global reputational test. He’s telling the world: your values are on trial in South Africa.

There’s subtext, too, in the insistence on “remake.” Apartheid isn’t framed as a policy to repeal; it’s a moral and civic environment to rebuild. And the promise of pride isn’t sentimental. It’s a wager that post-apartheid South Africa can become proof-of-concept: that a society built on racial hierarchy can be refashioned into something worth admiring, not out of charity, but out of collective responsibility. In the late Cold War era, when liberation movements were routinely reduced to proxies, Tambo stakes his cause on something harder to dismiss: the authority of truth, and the shame of ignoring it.