The end of a Chapter Long Walk Original Manuscript (Image #415)

committed to those principles. There were people around and I could not take the risk of delaying any longer. We shook hands and I left. He was of middle class origin and probably had no contact with Africans except for an occasional visitor in the hotel and his fears were in the circumstances not unreasonable. The problem of national minorities has faced many countries and has been approached in various ways, all depending on the actual conditions. In our case the Freedom Charter expressly guarantees the rights of all national groups and races, and makes the preaching and practice of national, race or colour discrimination a punishable crime. A novel feature that was hotly debated at the Durban meeting of the ANC National Executive and on the following day by the Joint Executives of the Congress movement as a whole was whether the planned strike should take the form of a non violent or peaceful stay at home as on previous occasions of of the normal strike where people not only downed tools but organised pickets outside railway and bus stations, factories and other work places, holding meetings and processions. There was a substantial group that felt that the normal stay at home we had used since 1950, good as it was in the sense of the impact it had made on the people themselves, industry and the enemy, was dominated by the self defeating element of non violence and peaceful struggle at a time when more militant forms were urgently required to check the wanton brutalities of the enemy. They felt that the stay at home tended to give the wrong impression that we were essentially reformist in our