The Lusaka Manifesto represented one of two strategies to deal with white minority rule in Southern Africa: To try to contain violence, preserve the status quo, and improve the humanitarian situation little by little through diplomatic means, small reforms, and compromises.
Vorster it developed the so-called "outward-looking policy", an effort to bind southern African countries economically, and in this way to discourage them from openly criticising its repressive internal politics.
This policy was at first openly opposed only by Tanzania under president Julius Nyerere and Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda, but their lobbying made the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) reject any further dialogue with South Africa.
[1] At that time independence movements had been formed in all white-ruled territories of Southern Africa, either with an explicit commitment to guerrilla warfare and sabotage or recently having scaled their activities from passive resistance, petitioning, and lobbying to an openly armed struggle.
[2] In South-West Africa SWAPO's paramilitary wing, the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) was founded in 1962,[3] its first military action occurred in Omugulugwombashe in 1966.
The liberalism expressed in it was in direct opposition to South African apartheid which saw rights and liberties of individual people as tantamount to communism, and as irreconcilable with its own nationalist policies.
They were mainly updates, without a real diversion from the manifesto's general direction,[5] although, in reaction to South Africa's complete rejection of the original document, they are written in a decisively tenser tone and stress much more the support of armed liberation movements.
[11] The ANC was likewise opposed to the Lusaka Manifesto as in their view the declaration legitimised the apartheid regime, pronouncing its status as a sovereign and independent UN-recognised entity.
ANC's main disappointment, though, was that its armed struggle, and that of its likeminded liberation movements FRELIMO, MPLA, SWAPO, ZANU, and ZAPU was not directly supported and rather seen as a possible future legitimate action, even if it already was in full swing.
Only a few years after the Lusaka Manifesto the buffer of white-ruled countries north of South Africa disintegrated rapidly, forcing the apartheid regime to take a different course of politics.
[27] The white rulers of South Africa eventually relinquished power to the black majority in 1994 but instead of acting on the moderate suggestions of the manifesto faced independence wars in all affected countries.