Anti Apartheid Activists

"[Haile Selassie] died a natural death, as far as I know. I can't deny that there were many of my men who would have been glad to kill him with their bare hands to avenge the fathers and brothers they had lost due to him. The doctor looking after him told me nothing about any deterioration in his health, so there was no way I could personally ascertain what happened."

"When [Nelson Mandela] was in prison I admired him for his moral strength... Of his period in power I can see few results. Apartheid no longer exists, at least to all appearances, but no one understands what the new government in South Africa is doing."

"One of the fundamental preconditions of successful socialist construction is to ensure the people's readiness to defend themselves from the ravages of probable regional or global wars on the basis of the balance of forces generating from the basic contradictions of our epoch."

"Mugabe fought and liberated his country from colonists. But I am here as a guest of the Zimbabwe people. I am not a personal guest of Mugabe. And veterans of the liberation struggle are well aware of this fact."

"what is important to me as it is for the Ethiopian people, is the unity of the country, the sovereignty of the country and I'm not ready to compromise on that."

"I am a revolutionary; my life is dedicated to freeing the people."

"When we planned our country's economic development, we had the strategic objective of our Revolution in mind. It was not planned for economic development [to be] solely an end in itself. There are some who have forgotten that the sole basis of our revolutionary struggle was the ideology and politics which we follow..."

"All I can say is that living for 17 years without rest from fighting, dealing with problem after problem, war after war, and crisis after crisis, every day and every hour was very difficult."

"Henceforth we will tackle our enemies that come face to face with us and we will not be stabbed in from behind by internal foes... To this end, we will arm the allies and comrades of the broad masses without giving respite to reactionaries, and avenge the blood of our comrades double - and triple - fold."

"The Soviet willingness to overlook the bloody reign of terror of Haile Mengistu, the dictator of Ethiopia from 1977 to 1991, indicated the degree to which the attitudes associated with Stalinism continued thereafter, not least if circumstances contributed to the Soviet Union gaining traction outside Europe. As a reminder of the longstanding tendency for Soviet commentators to interpret developments in terms of Soviet history and ideology, the Soviet envoy, Anatolii Ratanov, saw a similarity between the brutal activities of Mengistu’s supporters within the Derg (Coordinating Committee) and the early revolutionary experience in Russia. There was certainly a parallel with the War Communism and Terror of the Russian Civil War. Far from being marginal, success in Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s gave many Soviets a renewed sense of pride in their own achievements, and a conviction that the Soviet Union could contribute decisively to breakthroughs for Communism elsewhere. The American (and French) willingness, in response, to support Sese Soko Mobuto, the corrupt, brutal and dictatorial President of Zaire from 1965 to 1997, revealed a more general preparedness to overlook multiple faults in order to ensure that ‘our bastard’ was in charge, a policy long followed by the Americans in Latin America."

"We developed a mutual respect for one another. Schwarz was an extremely able MP with a good financial brain, and a hard worker who could devastate National Party members in Parliament, especially Ministers of Finance, who feared his vigorous attacks. Like me, he could be unpleasant both in and out of the House."

"To risk making predictions is rather presumptuous and unwise. If I’m wrong, it will never be forgotten. If I’m right, no one will remember."

"He is a brilliant debater with an extraordinarily acute mind. He goes for the jugular quicker than anyone else."

"Schwarz has not only been one of apartheid's most prominent opponents, but his ideas and the initiatives he had taken had played an important role in the development of the concept of a negotiated democracy in South Africa, based on the principles of freedom and justice. In this regard he is one of the conceptual and moral fathers of the new South Africa."

"I wish my country were like I wanted it to be, but as it is not, I hope it will one day get to this way of living."

"A champion of the poor."

"I said, 'Down with apartheid' before some of them [demonstrators] were born. I was supporting the dismantling of apartheid when America was standing on the sidelines and only a few people knew what apartheid was about."

"I believe people are not free if all they can do is cast a vote every five years to decide who should govern them. What does it mean to a man in a shack built by himself with no amenities and not knowing where his next meal is coming from, to vote? An election is about power. It is relevant to freedom only if those elected govern efficiently, honestly and carry out the electoral promises made."

"The quickest analytical mind in South African politics."

"If we are going to have greater unemployment, if we are going to have more unrest, the chances of a negotiated settlement will be less and in a revolutionary situation the chances of a truly free democratic society emerging are reduced.'""

"Morality is cheap when someone else is paying."

"I have an obligation to the 37 million people in South Africa to ensure their well-being. But the road from slavery to the promised land is a rough one."

"I must and will work to ensure that the new democratic South Africa has a fair chance to succeed economically as well as politically, and to try to assist in fulfilling at least a part of the dream of the oppressed and deprived when the new South Africa is born."

"Freedom is incomplete if it is exercised in poverty."

"You’re the last person who will dictate to me!"

"Laws alone is not enough to ensure that freedom is safeguarded. What is required is a sprit of freedom among the people concerned. There must be an atmosphere of respect, a feeling of belonging together, an atmosphere of harmony with fellow beings."

"I make this appeal to Mr Botha: Show this statesmanship, show that at this time you will not allow our unity of purpose to overcome the real problems to be threatened."

"The National Party does not care about people, it only cares about power."

"I regard the Honourable member for Randburg as a friend. I regard him as a person who has done tremendous work as treasurer of the United Party on the Witswatersrand branch. The test of friendship comes in what you do as a man in adversity. I want to say, and I make so secret of it, that I am my brother's keeper and I will not be his executioner."

"It is important that in the process of change, existing institutions of value and means of production are not destroyed. The fabric of society, however critical one may be of its present structures, should be adopted and modified where required, but not destroyed."

"The mission must be adherence to and the advancement of the concept of a truly democratic political system and economic system which gives not only rights and opportunity but also security."

"My lord, one can perhaps be pardoned for saying that perhaps his (Jimmy Kantor) biggest crime, if it is a crime, is that he was a partner of Harold Wolpe, and that Harold Wolpe was his brother-in-law."

"Whenever I draw up economic policy I look at it from the point of view of the person who has nothing; I look at it from the point of view of my farther who tried to get a job but could not."

"My Lord, it is difficult to reply in a restrained fashion. My learned friend must not use words such as 'Communist' lightly, when he refers to Kantor. Kantor is not a Communist. My learned friend has used the tactics of McCarthyism in an endeavour to smear him. I think, with respect, my learned friend is allowing himself to run away with facts that are not there. His complaint in count one is not that they found files with evidence. Oh not, he says that we found files with nothing in them. Not in Kantor's office, but in the office of Wolpe. Then my learned friend that the practice had been ruined and liquidated Knator's practice, my lord, it is not Kantor. It is not Kantor! Why I say it is so difficult to be restrained, is that my learned friend has thrown in everything hat concerns every accused in this case, and says 'that is why I don't want Kantor to get bail'."

"If the 60-year old MP for Yeoville is occasionally oversensitive, it is probably because - as one of the most talented and versatile people in Parliament - he finds himself frustrated by much of what goes on."

"South Africa's most feisty politician."

"When a man who has devoted most of his life to the struggle for a new South Africa tells you that apartheid is dead and that sanctions are holding up its burial, he speaks with a moral authority that is difficult to assail"

"One of the loudest voices for the deprived emanating from the white establishment. His calls on whites to make material sacrifices for black advancement have drawn abusive phone calls. But Schwarz is not easily diverted from his chosen course and is a persuasive advocate of his beliefs."

"Revenge should not be our motivation."

"You don't have to carry a gun to be a freedom fighter."

"He made enemies. He was held up as a Fascist by the poets of the Left but since they had already decreed that Plato was a Fascist, this too was something of a compliment. I once heard this wicked Fascist calmly recall that he had to leave South Africa because of the hostility he had aroused by seriously defending the cause of the Blacks in his writings...His reactions were those of a pastoral world in opposition to the industrial capital – the Tentacular City with its literary intrigues devised by the Intellect."

"You praise the firm restraint with which they write – I'm with you there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse?"

"Campbell has not any regulation political bias, I think. He may incline to Franco because he is a catholic, and to the Old Spain rather than the New Spain because he likes bullfights and all the romantic things. But of politics he has none, unless they are such as go with a great antipathy for the English "gentleman" in all his clubmanesque varieties; a great attachment to the back-Veldt of his native South Africa; and a constant desire to identify himself with the roughest and simplest of his fellow-creatures in pub, farm, and bullring. Such politics as go with those predilections and antipathies he has, but it would be difficult to give them a name. He certainly is neither a communist nor a fascist."

"With white tails smoking free, Long streaming manes, and arching necks, they show Their kinship to their sisters of the sea – And forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow. Still out of hardships bred, Spirits of power and beauty and delight Have ever on such frugal pastures fed And loved to course with tempests through the night."

"Of all the clever people round me here I most delight in Me – Mine is the only voice I care to hear, And mine the only face I like to see."

"Roy Campbell was an altogether more robust character, full of he-man postures, bronco-busting and similar exploits; a type which I usually rather suspect, but much in him was genuine."

"The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss As intimate as love, as cold as death."

"Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction, Like desert lilies forked with tongues of fire."

"The timeless, surly patience of the serf That moves the nearest to the naked earth And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers."

"We shall not meet again: over the wave Our ways divide, and yours is straight and endless – But mine is short and crooked to the grave: Yet what of these dark crowds, amid whose flow I battle like a rock, aloof and friendless – Are not their generations, vague and endless, The waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?"