Tambo is not just the name of the airport

I found out who O.R. Tambo is. I did not even know he was a "who." I thought it was just the name of the international airport I use to fly in and out of Joburg. But it turns out he most certainly is a "who" and there is currently an exhibit going on about him  curated by the Apartheid Museum.

This kind of connecting of the dots will help me to settle into living in South Africa and establish my sense of place. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my husband many years ago while we were touring around northern Vermont. I grew up in the birthplace of the American Revolution in the northeast of the United States of America in one of the 13 original colonies. So in grammar school, details of the Revolutionary War between the colonials and the red-coated British were staple fare in history class. My husband on the other hand grew up in the mid-west, specifically in Minnesota and Kansas, where other American conflicts such as the Civil War and the French and Indian War as well as the whole Manifest Destiny, "Go west, young man" and Oregon Trail wagon train concepts were much more topical subjects in his schooling. Still I was surprised when he commented as we passed a statue of Ethan Allen in downtown Montpelier, "I cannot believe they erected a statue after a furniture store here!" "You mean Ethan Allen as in Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys?" I replied. "The who?" "The Green Mountain Boys! Didn't you learn about them in school?" "No." So I dusted off my Third Grade Revolutionary War patriot memories and explained who Ethan Allen really was, also known as the lecture on "what came first, the Ethan Allen furniture chain or the Green Mountain Boys?"

Much the same with O.R. Tambo. Born five years after the birth of the African National Congress (the ANC) Oliver Reginald Tambo spent most of his life serving in the struggle against apartheid. 'O.R.', as he was popularly known by his peers, was born in 1917 in a rural town, Mbizana, in eastern Mpondoland in what was then the Cape Province (now Eastern Cape).

Tambo, along with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, was a founding member of the ANC Youth League in 1943, becoming its first National Secretary and later a member of the National Executive in 1948. In 1955, Tambo became Secretary General of the ANC after Walter Sisulu was banned by the South African government under the Suppression of Communism Act. In 1958, Tambo became the Deputy President before being exiled himself in 1959.

According to the ANC website, among black South African leaders, Oliver Tambo was probably the most highly respected on the African continent, in Europe, Asia and the Americas. During his stewardship of the ANC he raised its international prestige and status to that of an alternative to the Pretoria Government. He was received with the protocol reserved for Heads of State in many parts of the world.

During his years in the ANC, Oliver Tambo played a major role in the growth and development of the movement and its policies. He was among the generation of African nationalist leaders who emerged after the Second World War who were instrumental in the transformation of the ANC from a liberal-constitutionalist organisation into a radical national liberation movement.

He returned to South Africa in 1991, after over three decades in exile. At the ANC's first legal national conference inside South Africa, held in Durban in July 1991, Tambo was elected National Chairperson of the ANC. He was also chairperson of the ANC's Emancipation Commission. Unfortunately he passed away before seeing the cause he worked so hard to promote come to fruition with the election of Nelson Mandela as the nation's first freely elected black president.

So the next time I run through O.R. Tambo Airport to catch my flight, I will have to keep my eyes open for a statue of the airport's namesake. I am sure there is one.