Mphumzi Mdekazi
If youll permit me, I would like to thank The Rector and The Vice Rector for International Cooperation, Youth and Social Policy (Stanislav Surovtsev), as well as Chairperson of the Organising Committee and all the present academics here with us.
My sincerest gratitude goes to the Student Association for the invite to be here with you to share with my views of the relations between Africa a previously colonized continent with Russia.
It would be insincere of me if I do not admit right from the outset that the ANC - which is currently the governing party - is indebted to the people of Russia for their sincere and enduring support in so many ways. Which is why I did not hesitate to take this opportunity.
With the help of the British, Belgium, Portugal, and France etc our country and Continent was completely taken over and the indigenous peoples subjugated to a underclass.
The history of discrimination and outright violent conquest and racial subordination was later crystallized into a doctrine of separateness and inequality, where the black people were by law declared of a lower status to the invaders of the land and sadly, recognized as such by much of the world for the better part of the 21st century after many attempts at resistance to this colonial subjugation later called Apartheid, we in our case, the indigenous people of the country had taken a decision that we would use every avenue available to free ourselves from this systematic oppression.
Organized around a common umbrella body the Africa National Congress (ANC), we sought help from countries who we believed had a clear political ideology that recognized the rights of all people to determine their future, but more especially countries that had a shared value system as ours, of democracy and equality.
We reached out to these countries by sending delegations to request support for our struggle. Amongst those who were sent by the ANC was JB Marks from South Africa side to Russia.
These developments did not happen overnight, they stretched on for decades and in that time the world received a number of delegations from the African people requesting support in their struggle against a heinously racist white tribe that had established their hegemony over the indigenous peoples in the most barbarous ways and gradually became recognized as State, where the original inhabitants were the hewers of wood and the invaders (so to speak) took over the governance and ownership of the means of production.
Faced with the evil system that gradually took grip of the country, black people searched for solutions. Starting, firstly by organizing into various forms of resistance, culminating in establishments of resistance forces and programmes to assert the power of the indigenous people who were generally oppressed.
The heinous policies of South Africa are well known, we do not need to go into detail here, except to give you a Birds Eye view on how we came to be what we sought to do to get ourselves out of this iron grip evil system.
As I place the premium of this lecture into historical perspective and faced with the then evil system that gradually took grip of our, it is because I want to illustrate that black people didnt fold arms, as they embarked on rebellious democratic and undemocratic conventions to free themselves.
The first of the more dominant political movements to reach out to the world outside of themselves for help was the African National Congress as indicated here above.
Significantly, having refined its own Nationalist ideology, it felt that there was a need to reach out to like minded peoples in the world to seek help to undertake the struggle that would take a century forward.
For our purposes here, we might want to go straight to the important aspect of our foraging for partners of our struggle. These were those countries from whom we had learnt a great deal about how to consolidate strategies to help us coalesce our people around a common ideology and a common program of action.
We reached out to countries we needed as partners in our struggle, countries whose ideology was one we subscribed to; Countries that had gone through their own struggles and countries we looked up to .There were several delegations sent out and significantly one was to the then Soviet Union a country from whom much had been learnt, a country we were certain would be willing to help us free ourselves from a colonial racist grip and the rest of the western world that had recognized the the racist colonial state. It is important to note that the less talked about and least celebrated, namely Walter Sisulu and Duma Nokwe went to see Chairman Mao in China, for the same course.
One would would even foretell that BRICS was a foregone economic embryonic block in spiritual political thought, given the foresight and the benefit of hindsight of all these efforts by o
