It is both a pleasure and an honor for me to address you tonight, just a few hours after one of our nation’s most important elections and at a time when we are at the threshold of fundamental new choices of policies for the African continent.

I must tell you quite honestly that I’m very pleased that the voters have mandated a change in the administration in America and a new direction for our country. My pleasure goes beyond the fact that I am a Democrat and that a Democrat was elected to the presidency. In fact, it has nothing to do with partisan politics.

The academic career has its great obligations. It also has its privileges. It is a particularly gratifying honor to have the opportunity to address this distinguished audience of Africanists drawn from many nations. As your retiring President, this honor is compounded by the great privilege to address you on a subject of my own choosing—apparently simple and innocent enough until one thinks about what an intimidating experience it really is.

For the last ten years the issue of U.S. bank loans to South Africa has been a clear focus for many U.S. church bodies. Documents provided for the record of this hearing include resolutions from the late 1960s from the Conventions, Synods, and Assemblies of several major Protestant denominations. These resolutions clearly call for an end to U.S. financial support to the land of apartheid. The vigorous campaign of the 1960s for an end to bank loans to South Africa resulted in a victory when a $40 million floating credit by ten U.S. banks was not renewed. Dozens of discussions were held with bank officials and millions of dollars in accounts were withdrawn in protest in that campaign.

[Note: This interview was conducted on September 22, 1976 by the Mozambican Information Agency. Mr. Machingura is a political commissar in the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA) and provides the first major statement for the Western public of the goals and policies of ZIPA. The failure of the Western press to provide information about ZIPA has left the field to the propaganda efforts of the Rhodesián Smith regime, which defines the ZIPA soldiers as “terrs” (terrorists). An opposing understanding of the ZIPA movement has been proffered by the frontline African presidents. In their first public response to the Smith announcement of agreement with the Kissinger terms of settlement, the five presidents began with a statement of congratulation to the Zimbabwean soldiers who had brought the white regime to the point of seeking a settlement publically, even though this too may have been another Smith ploy to gain time by avoiding substantive changes.

Soweto, Rhodesia, and Umtata in 1976 are poignant and pointed symbols of change and continuity in Southern Africa. Regional politics here as in other international subsystems are characterized by the tension between order and continuity on the one hand and opposition and change on the other. This trinity of symbols consists, in part, of a revival of the violence of Sharpeville, earlier diplomacy over Zimbabwe and Afrikanerdom’s continued ambivalence towards the demands of African nationalism. But clearly it also embodies new features, especially the apparent inexhaustibility of black anger, the greater imperative of a settlement, and the unacceptability of “separate freedoms” respectively. Moreover, both the regional and global environments have evolved significantly in the last decade so that apparently similar events in Southern Africa may now have new meanings, implications, and results.

Little that happens in Western Sahara is accepted as an indisputable development by all the parties concerned. It is not simply that differing interpretations are advanced. Rather, the facts themselves are in dispute. One such instance is the case of the Djemaa, the tribal assembly established by Spain to serve as a local consultative link with the colonial administration.