SANF 05 no 79
A project to document the history of the liberation struggle in southern Africa has started in seven countries.
The recent summit of SADC leaders in Botswana, marking the Silver Jubilee of the regional community, noted that the “Hashim Mbita Project” had begun implementation and reaffirmed their commitment to the project.
The participating countries to date are Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Hashim Mbita was Executive Secretary of the Liberation Committee of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) for 20 years from 1974 until after South Africa gained majority rule in 1994.
The Liberation Committee, which was established at the founding summit of the OAU in 1963 to support the decolonisation process diplomatically and materially, was formally ended in August 1994 with a closing report titled, Mission Accomplished.
For more than 30 years, the committee was located in the United Republic of Tanzania where the first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, and the Tanzanian people gave it their full support.
Mwalimu Nyerere, who died in 1999, was a founding father of the OAU and the first chairperson of the Front Line States, which established the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), that later became SADC.
The outgoing Tanzanian president, Benjamin Mkapa, who is standing down this year, told his SADC colleagues in his farewell speech at Summit that he was pleased “the Hashim Mbita Project is up and running to document for posterity the history of shared struggle that forged our enduring solidarity.”
He thanked the government of South Africa for providing resources to begin “this important historical task”.
Brigadier-General Mbita, the project patron, who is Tanzania’s ambassador to Zimbabwe, gave a keynote address at the launch in Dar es Salaam in August, at a workshop on “Documentation of the History of the Liberation Struggle of Southern Africa”.
In his inspirational address to the national researchers, Mbita said the “decolonisation struggle which engulfed the African continent during the last 60 years was basically one, though fought in various parts and against different colonizing powers.”
Thus, the need to “record the inspiration, commitment, determination, sacrifices, means, strategies and experiences gained at different stages became apparent,” he said.
Noting the decade that has passed since majority rule in South Africa and the need to advance more rapidly toward this goal, he said the people attending the history workshop “manifest the collective will of SADC Member States to leave for posterity some written account of the political transformation of the region.”
He thanked Mozambique and Namibia for being the first to pledge resources for the project, and South Africa for funding the initiation of the activities.
He said this venture is “the first such collective undertaking of this magnitude in Africa. There is a lot that has been written about Africa mostly by non-Africans. Hence looked through alien lenses.
“SADC has now afforded you African scholars a unique opportunity to record our history in the right perspective.
“We who are here today have either lived to witness the process of the liberation particularly from the 1960s or are just beneficiaries of that struggle. Whichever the case, we owe it to posterity to contribute in availing future generations with objective accounts of that history and leave in documents and data for further research,” Mbita said.
“The realization of this project has taken appreciable time, and for me it is coming to light after almost eleven years of a passionate dream to have Africa take its destiny into its own hands as it indeed did in the decolonisation process.”
Describing SADC as a grouping of former Portuguese, German, Boer and British colonies, he said “their transition to freedom and the coming to being of SADC is what are before you to record.
“First as victims, second as defiant people and third as victors.”
“The stages that this process went through covered agitation, political organization and eventually physical confrontation.
“The birth of the Frontline States as a dependable rear base and victory which saw the establishment of SADC as an organ for economic transformation and consolidation of the regional security, peace and defence must be carefully examined.
“What, for example, would this region be had there not been the likes of Presidents Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Sir Seretse Khama as well as the uncompromising leaders of National Liberation Movements of the time?” (SARDC)
