In exile during apartheid, the ANC used the January 8th statement as a message to inform, educate, conscientise and mobilise ordinary people, in all communities of southern Africa, behind the strategy of the liberation movement for that given year.

This tradition started being implemented in 1972, just four years after the ANC’s watershed Morogoro conference in 1969 which elevated the momentum of the anti-apartheid struggle pursued by this movement...