Politics & Power Quote by Oliver Tambo

A single sentence that tries to make inevitability out of aspiration. Oliver Tambo’s “We seek to create a united Democratic and non-racial society” is deliberately spare: no enemies named, no revenge promised, no romantic nationalism. That restraint is the point. In the late apartheid era, the liberation movement had to be more than an opposition; it had to sound like a government-in-waiting, credible to Black South Africans who’d paid the cost of segregation and to a nervous white minority trained to hear “majority rule” as code for retribution.

The verb “seek” matters. It’s morally assertive but tactically flexible, signaling resolve without staking legitimacy on immediate victory. Tambo was often speaking from exile, building coalitions, fundraising, and reassuring foreign governments that the ANC’s horizon wasn’t a one-party state. “United” and “Democratic” do double duty: they promise inclusion while quietly marginalizing both apartheid’s architects and any would-be liberators tempted by authoritarian shortcuts. This is a future that refuses the logic of “replace one ruling race with another,” a refusal embedded in the third term, “non-racial,” which in South Africa is not a soft ideal but a direct counter-architecture to a system that made race the operating system of law, housing, work, and intimacy.

Rhetorically, the line works because it is not catharsis; it’s a contract offer. It invites the country to imagine itself as something other than its trauma, while making clear that the old order has no moral right to be preserved.