Shaun Benton
1 September 2006
Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan has approved the name change of Johannesburg International Airport to OR Tambo International Airport.
Jordan told Parliament in Cape Town on Thursday that a formal naming ceremony was scheduled for 27 October, the birthday of the former leader of the African National Congress (ANC).
Oliver Tambo was born in 1917 in Mbizana in eastern Pondoland, in the northern region of what is now known as the Eastern Cape.
Along with former president Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, Tambo was a founding member of the ANC Youth League in 1943 and led a programme of boycotts, civil disobedience, strikes and non-collaboration with the apartheid government.
He became secretary-general of the ANC in 1995 and deputy president in 1958 and, after a banning order issued by the apartheid government, went abroad to mobilise opposition to apartheid.
In 1985, at the height of the struggle against apartheid, Tambo was elected president of the ANC.
He returned to South Africa in 1991 after spending more than 30 years in exile, and died from a stroke in April 1993, a year before South Africa's first democratic elections.
Source: BuaNews
