African Nationalism
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan speaking to the Parliament of South Africa, on 3 February 1960.
The most striking impression of all that I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African National Consciousness. In different places it takes different forms, but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact..
[we have tried to] create a society which respects the rights of individuals, a society in which men are given the opportunity to grow to their full stature, and that must in our view include the opportunity for an increasing share in political power and responsibility, a society finally in which individual merit and individual merit alone is the criterion for man’s advancement, whether political or economic.
…As a fellow member of the Commonwealth it is our earnest desire to give South Africa our support and encouragement, but I hope you won’t mind my saying frankly that there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible for us to do this without being false to our own deep convictions about the political destinies of free men to which in our own territories we are trying to give effect..
The Lusaka Manifesto was agreed by the Organisation of African Unity on 16th April 1969
8. Our stand towards Southern Africa thus involves a rejection of racialism, not a reversal of the existing racial domination. We believe that all the peoples who have made their homes in the countries of Southern Africa are Africans, regardless of the colour of their skins…
we are demanding an opportunity for all the people … working together as equal individual citizens, to work out for themselves the institutions and the system of government under which they will, by general consent, live together and work together to build a harmonious society.
12. … we can neither surrender nor compromise. We have always preferred, and we still prefer, to achieve it without physical violence. We would prefer to negotiate rather than destroy, to talk rather than kill …But while peaceful progress is blocked by actions of those at present in power in the States of Southern Africa, we have no choice but to give to the peoples of those territories all the support of which we are capable in their struggle against their oppressors.
The Union of South Africa is …a Member of the United Nations. It is more highly developed and richer than any other nation in Africa… The apartheid policy … is based on a rejection of man’s humanity. A position of privilege or the experience of oppression in the South African society depends on the one thing which it is beyond the power of any man to change…
South Africa should be excluded from the United Nations… It should be isolated from world trade patterns