With October coming to an end, I will always remember the day old Johannesburg International (or Jan Smuts) Airport was named after Oliver Reginald Tambo.
It was on October 27, 2006 on the birthday of this special man.
Shortly before this day Ekurhuleni metro decided that October will from then always be OR Tambo month and April Chris Hani month.
At first, to me, going to the airport (again) was only another story I had to cover as a journalist, but then I got curious about who Oliver Tambo is and what he stood for.
I briefly met and photographed Adelaide Tambo and her and Oliver’s children on the day before I started a journey to discover his world.
During these festivities we received a book: Oliver Tambo, His Life and Legacy by Luli Callinicos from which I will quote some of his accomplishments.
Tambo was president of the ANC from 1977 until 1990.
During his fifty years of political activity in the ANC, Comrade OR, as he is affectionately called, played a significant role in the history of the movement.
As son of Mzimeni and Julia Tambo he was born on October 27 in 1917 in Nkantolo, about 20km from Mbizana in Pondoloand.
Callinicos writes in the book that the values and skills that enabled him to make such an important impact on South Africa were rooted in his traditional rural roots and the expertise he acquired through education.
He studied at a missionary school in Flagstaff and later at St Peters in Johannesburg.
After school he decided to study science at the University of Fort Hare and did a diploma in higher education.
He became a teacher, first in his hometown, but later in Johannesburg, where got to know like-minded young men like Walter Sizulu and Nelson Mandela.
Tambo was there when the ANC youth league was founded in 1944 in Bloemfontein – with Anton Lembede as chairman, him as secretary and Walter Sisulu as treasurer.
Since then he was active in the ANC’s struggle against the apartheid regime.
He and Adelaide got married in December 1956 and settled in Wattville, Benoni.
They had two babies when the family went into exile shortly after the shooting of 69 people at Sharpville on March 21, 1960.
The order was that Tambo would gather international support for the liberation of the ANC movement, which he did throughout this years in exile.
The family returned to South Africa in December 1990, after keeping the ANC flame alive overseas.
Precisely a year before South Africa’s first democratic election, he died on April 23, 1993 after a fatal stroke.
His death came two weeks after the assassination of Chris Hani.
Mama Adelaide, as everyone called her, died on January 31, 2007.
One of Oliver Tambo’s quotes, still haunts me: “It is our responsibility to break down barriers of division and create a country where there will be neither whites nor blacks, just South Africans, free and united in diversity.”
And this legacy lives on.
After all these studies, I decided I will always tell his story to the young ones, because South Africa needs to honour its heroes.
My favourite question to all young ones is: “Did you know that OR Tambo is one of our country’s heroes?”
