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Dear Comrade, President Oliver Tambo and the foundations of South Africa's Constitution written by Andre Orenda with editorial contributions by Alby Sacks. Continuation of reading introduction. 1.4. The point above helps illustrate a key argument made in dear common president, namely that the regime and its agents were not enlightened visionaries driving change or willing coauthors of a new democratic order in South Africa. They were latecomers to the idea bereft of political alternatives to the apartheid world view, weakened by insular thinking and faced with the inability of repression to bring order. They were dragged to the negotiable table. After 1919, they were again failed to control the process as they had intended to do Hollywood narratives in films like Endgame 2009 and books by writers from the apartheid establishment such as Neil Barnard and Willie, claiming foresight and enlightenment on the part of the system need to be better contextualized and fundamentally reevaluated and debunked Nelson Mandela and Aziz Pahad were prominent in the earliest substantive talks from 1988 onwards, was surprised to discover how clearly uninformed Bernard Esta and other members of the White establishment were about the dynamics of the freedom struggle and broader South African history. Mandela's experience was that his new colleagues were largely ignorant about South African politics outside the narrow white minority world that they knew little about the A NC. Although they were all sophisticated afrikaners and far more open minded than nearly all their brethren. Thus from the mid 19 eighties, while a climate of insurrection swept the country, the A NC and its internal allies wove constitutionalism in as one of the distinct threads of an enormously complex multifaceted and sometimes contradictory struggle during a decisive indeed epochal moment in South Africa's history. Dear comrade President now details this 19 eighties genesis of the intense process of struggle, negotiation and constitutional planning that ended formal apartheid and led to the birth of a new nation. It is necessary to follow the Constitution's committee's activities and thinking from 1986 onwards to see how this happened and how constitutionalism and negotiations became a key pillar of the A N C's thinking, strategy and tactics in the second half of the 19 eighties. In the following this one distinctive stand. The book also brings a light little known aspect of broader A NC culture and South African politics and history. It also brings out the way the A NC interacted with many other political and social forces at home and further a field who contributed their own thought energy and activity to the bringing down of apartheid. Some striking fact emerged from an exploration of the archives containing the key foundational documents mentioned earlier. The first is that Tambo established the intellectual foundation of the constitution, drawing heavily on a paper, he had commissioned Paula Jordan to prepare in his own particular manner. He was in charge at all times. He navigated the process through the various structures of the A NC and chose his moment late in the day to make his own direct and significant intervention. The second is that in plotting this new strategic path in the 19 eighties, Oliver Tambo, the Constitution Committee and the A NC symbolically and concretely connected with and drew inspiration from a deep history of African constitutionalism in South Africa. They were drawing on a long tradition of theorizing and mobilization by black intellectuals and activists going back well over a century from the 19 sixties onwards, which led to the first proto nationalist organizations, newspapers demands for the franchise and creation of national networks in the 18 eighties, 18 nineties and early 19 hundreds. This process of mobilization has been dealt with in depth by the author. In his early writings taken off from here, the OCO President argues that understanding the 20th century liberation struggle and A NC strategies in the 19 eighties and 19 nineties requires an understanding of this deeper historical context too also in relation to the A N CS internationalism and operation in exile. Even though the A NC was founded in 1912, 4 of its five presidents had already traveled abroad to study before 1900. The earliest generation of intellectuals and activists protesting discrimination and political exclusion in colonial South Africa, like those operating in the difficult but rich terrain of exile, drew on international ideas and developments from the start as part of the African aspirations to become global citizens and shapers of a new society in South Africa. This knowledge should encourage us to take a long view of the struggle for democracy and its fundamental concepts and ideas, key 19 eighties, actors and planners like Oliver Tambo and Paulo Jordan had direct linkages to earlier generations of constitutionalists. The president Secretary General and other leaders often refer to their own organizations pre exile past to explain the strategy. It was adopting the A N C's demand for constitute assembly in the late 19 eighties and early 19 nineties was consistent two with early demands by African spokespeople for a national convention to create an inclusive political order. The calling of the South African native Convention in Bloemfontein in 19 09 was in response to the calabar clauses of the constitution of the New ***** of South Africa and led directly to the founding of the A NC and the NATO parliament. Three years later in 1923 the A NC adopted the Bill of Rights for South Africa. Its tone was differential and its terms limited, but it articulated the idea of everyone having certain fundamental rights, irrespective of race, color or creed. Then in response to the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act and the final removal of Africans from the voters role in the Cape Province in 1935. Up until 1936 the A NC helped call together all African convention A AC, which was meant to be the most representative national convention ever of Chiefs, leaders and representatives of all shades of political thought. A few years later during World War two, the A NC adopted the Africans claim document, a clause by clause response to Churchill and Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter, which laid out the basis for a post World War two era of human rights and freedoms. The Atlantic Charter gave rise to the formation of the United Nations in 1945 and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN. In 1948 the Africans claims document included a comprehensive bill of rights and the set the benchmark for the future. It unequivocally demanded the same full citizenship rights for colonized people as those claimed by the former colonizers in the developed nations, including rights to equal justice, freedom of residence, freedom of movement, and freedom of the press, free education and free, equal social security benefits, recognition of the sanctity of the home, the right to own land and engage in all forms of lawful occupations, et cetera. In 1955 Congress of the people which adopted the Freedom Charter and the 1961 all in Africa conferences call for a national convention in the post shop era. At the same time, South Africa became a republic or more well known steps that perpetuated the convention's idea. The goal of the all in Africa conference was unambiguous. We demand that a national convention of elected representatives of all adult men and women, irrespective of race, color, creed or other limitation be called by the ***** government. Not later than May 31st, 1961 that the convention shall have sovereign powers to determine in any way the majority of representatives decide a new non racial Democratic Constitution for South Africa. The discussion in this book about the role of the freedom chart in the mid 19 eighties, the presence of them King Sabata Dalin at Kabwe, the intellectual pedigree of Paula Jordan who drafted the new phase of counter revolution and the way the A NC in exile engaged with global debates and networks all illustrate the link with this long tradition of constitutional politics at the opening of the in House seminar in Lusaka. In March 1988 Secretary General Alfred stated that the constitutional guidelines were extensions of these earlier clarion calls, many of the words and ideas articulated in these early pronouncements, particularly in Africans claims and the freedom charter would run straight through into the new constitution in the 19 nineties on an ideological level too. This author has shown that debates about the elusive and shifting connections and balances between Africanism and black consciousness and non racialism which remain key issues in Southern Africa started not with Steve Biko or Bani Piana in the 19 sixties nor buk in the 19 fifties or, and I in the 19 forties, but with the constitutionalists of the 19th century, but these continuities were not seamless, shifting economic, political and social context resulted in regular ruptures and contradictions in broader politics, as well as contest stations within the A NC itself. As the revolutionary Marxism, direct action, defiance and different ideological tendencies including Gandhian passive resistance emerged, asserted themselves and vied for space. Zube has reminded us that revolutionary movements and organizations consist of many coalitions, factions and individuals who sometimes have conflicting interests. And it is important to recognize this in the broad church movement led by the A NC as well. Nevertheless, constitutionalism was indisputably in the DNA of the 73 year old A NC when it decided in 1985 to reconnect in a different context and in altogether more assertive manner with a tradition that had long been central to its politics until Sharpeville, the subsequent bannings and the unforgiven repression of apartheid put it on a new trajectory of self defense via armed struggle and the revolutionary seizure of power. Hopefully, this process of reconnection and the complexities and contradictions that accompanied its unfolding this time in tandem with mass mobilization, underground activity, armed attacks and international solidarity action are reflected in the pages that follow Oliver Tambo led the A NC for the entire 33 years of its exile holding the Liberation Movement together against huge odds. In August 1989 he arrived back in Lusaka from a to Chi journey in a small airplane arranged for him by President Kenneth Kaunda. He had flown to Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania where his team received important advice from Julius, then to Harare in Zimbabwe, to Gaborone in Botswana and finally to Luanda in Angola to secure his plan for the South African negotiation process. And the exiles returned home that night after a further session of dotting the I's and crossing the Ts on the Harare Declaration that would give the African content a critical role in bringing down apartheid and ushering in a new constitutional order. Tambo collapsed incapacitated by a stroke. The Constitution's Committee, Zola Square was in the room and called for help as he tried to make the chief comfortable on the couch. Tumble's work had been done. His journey was over but a new chapter in the history of South Africa was about to be written. This book ends as th and the other constitution committee members returned to South Africa in 1990. The committee morphed into an expanded constitutional think tank with a contingent of home based legal heavyweights including longer Arthur Kess Ken George Bezos, Dullah Omar and Tambo landed to a huge welcome at Johannesburg Jansma airport. Which was later renamed after him. The remarkable process that started in the back rooms between Cha cha cha and Cairo Road in Lusaka on 8 January 1986 ended 10 years, 11 months and two days later, when the new Constitution of Democratic South Africa was signed into being by Nelson Mandela on the 10th of December 1996 in Sharpeville. That document or the product of deep rooted African imaginations and struggles grounded in the lived experience of generations of dispossessed and disenfranchised South Africans. The task of recognizing the African agency at work in creating a new country as well as decolonizing the story of this transitional slice of South Africa's history is very much overdue. The dispossessed and disenfranchised people of South Africa gathered support from Democrats throughout the world and became the architects of their own freedom in a struggle stretching across generations, the oppressed wrested justice from history and defined the contours of their own destiny, they imagined engineered and won freedom. It was not given to them. That is the bottom line conclusion of this book.