UN General Assembly
1978

308. Rather than be given verbal assurances, Africa and our Organization are entitled to witness specific gestures on the part of the Western Members. On the one hand, instructed by colonial history, they are in a position to understand the justice of the cause of subjected peoples and to assess their determination to win in the end. Moreover, the past of many of them is characterized by desperate struggles to gain or maintain their independence. Finally, it seems that the place of those who escaped the scourge of nazism should naturally be in the forefront of the anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggle. The humiliations and the tombs are there: devastating proof to compensate for any lapse of memory which might occur. 309. If, despite all these reasons, a decisive opening has been so long in coming, it is beyond all doubt because of the existence in these colonies-and in southern Africa especially—of vital material interests, objectively linked to the socio-political structures of the racist and colonialist systems.