Celebrating the Freedom Charter
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The African e-Journals Project has digitized full text of articles of eleven social science and humanities journals. This item is from the digital archive maintained by Michigan State University Library. Find more at: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/africanjournals/ Available through a partnership with Scroll down to read the article. Transforation 6 (1988) Review CELEBRATING THE FREEDOM CHARTER Gavin Williams Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Cronin - 30 YEARS OF THE FREEDOM CHARTER (Ravan Press: Johannesburg) (1986))1 30 Years of the Freedom Charter is a celebratory volume, published to com- memorate the adoption of the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955 and to stress its continuing relevance to the struggle against apartheid. It combines the texts of documents, interviews with participants in the Congress itself and contemporary leaders of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and commentary by the editors, with photographs of events and of activists. The volume draws links between the mobilisation around the Congress of the People and subsequent struggles. It shows how several of those active in the campaign for the Congress of the People subsequently served prison sentences on Robben Island and have re-emerged to play a part in the UDF. It also carries interviews with a more recent generation of activists who came out of the Black Conscious- ness Movements and then through 'charterist' politics into the UDF. Several clerics, Christian and Muslim, stress the compatibility of the Freedom Charter with the messages of Islam and Christianity. The volume does what it sets out to do, and does it well. The interviews with participants in the 1955 Congress are of particular interest and, given the conditions of state repression under which they were collected, a singular achievement. Of those who were interviewed for, or contributed to, the volume, Wilson Fanti, Christmas Tinto and Popo Molefe are in detention at the time of writing, as well as Raymond Suttner. That others should follow up this initiative is important for our understanding of the history of the struggle against apartheid, of the meanings which it had for participants from different social, political, educational and racial backgrounds and of the diverse contributions they made to it. The volume is less successful in situating the Freedom Charter and its in- fluence in historical context and in its defence of the Freedom Charter against named and unnamed critics. An extensive historical exposition is beyond the aims of the book, though a fuller account would have enriched our appreciation of the Freedom Charter and of its historical significance. It is possibly not the task of a commemorative volume of this sort to engage in a polemic with the Charter's contemporary critics. The critics might better have been left to their own concerns and the debate to other publications' where it has continued to rage since the publication of 30 Years Of the Freedom Charter. My comments in this review, then, are less criticisms of the book than a discussion of some of the is- sues that its publication raises. The editors and the participants interviewed situate the Freedom Charter in 73 Transformation Williams the Popular struggles of the 1950s, commencing with the Defiance Campaign. They do not discuss the significant developments within the African National Congress of South Africa (ANC) in the 1940s, nor previous formulations of a programme for the ANC. Consideration of these events and texts would help to understand some aspects of the Charter and the controversies surrounding it. THE FORMATION OF THE CONGRESS ALLIANCE The Congress Alliance emerged from the experience of the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws organised by a joint National Action Committee of the ANC and the South African Indian Congress (SAIC). It was consolidated by the formation of the National Action Council of the ANC, the SAIC, the newly- formed S A Congress of Democrats (SACOD) and the S A Coloured People's Or- ganisation (SACPO) which set out to organise the Congress of the People. This process built on the shared involvement of their members in preparations for the Congress and in the event itself, by the Congress's adoption of the Freedom Charter, and by the common experience of the leaders of the Alliance in the Treason Trial. The formation of the Alliance and the Adoption of the Freedom Charter (pp.262-66;also in Karis and Carter, 1977: 3.2O5-7)3 and particularly the claim 'that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white ...' as well as the clause 'All National Groups Shall have Equal Rights' forced open the breach be- tween supporters of the Charter and its Afncamst critics, who were to form the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959. The Africanists' objections were primarily to the alliance with non-African organisations which, they believed, diluted the voice of Africans and the Africanists' particular interpretation of African Nationalism. Their most bitter resentments, directed against the communists within the Congress Alliance, were shared with those influential members of the Liberal Party whose anti-communism led the party to decide not to participate in the Congress of the People (Everatt. 1987). Suttner and Cronin (pp. 113-15) cite a cogent article in Drum of December 1955 which drew out the various strands of opinion within the Congress move- ment. There was some unease within the ANC, particularly in Natal, with some of its formulations, other than those which attracted the wrath of the Africanists. The clause which attracted most controvery was that 'The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole'. Acceptance of the Charter in March 1956 was to commit the ANC for the first time to accepting the principle of nationalization. This for- mulation went as far as its drafters could reasonably have gone in a socialist direction. The hope that there 'will be a committee of workers to run the Gold Mines (and) ... that the workers will take over and run the factories was left to Ben Turok to raise in introducing the clause at Kliptown. What the liberal nationalist and socialist wings of the ANC were agreed on was their commitment to co-operation with non-African opponents of apartheid 74 Transformation Williams and 'an all-inclusive' (Lutuli, 1955) non-racial nationalism. How the commit- ment to non-racialism would be implemented remained, and continued to remain, an issue within the ANC and the Congress Alliance (Simons, 1985: 104-6). The ANC's 1959 National Executive Committee (NEC) Report was to insist against critics of its, in effect, exclusively African membership that 'The ANC was formed to unite and voice the views of Africans. That remains its primary purpose' (ANC, 1959:485). The form of the Congress Alliance, of an alliance of four organisations each with a racially-defined constituency, allowed the ANC to reconcile its historical purpose as the voice of the African people with its com- mitment to a non- racial future for South Africa. Whereas the formulations of the Freedom Charter are ambiguous on the question of socialism, they are quite clear in their repudiation of any racially exclusive nationalism. AFRICANS' CLAIMS IN SOUTH AFRICA The ANC's policy statements in the 1940s emphasised the central grievan- ces which arise from the specific instruments and forms of oppression to which African people were, and are, subject. The fullest statement is the Bill of Rights in the ANC's Africans' Claims in South Africa adopted by the ANC's Annual Conference on 16 December 1943 (ANC, 1943). Most of the same demands were made in the Ten Point Programme adopted on 17 December 1943 at a joint con- ference of the All-African Convention (AAC) and the Anti-CAD (Coloured Af- fairs Department) which became the programme of the rival Non-European Unity Movement. Common to all the ANC's statements7 is a claim for Africans to receive equality of treatment with Europeans in all aspects of life. And, as with the Freedom Charter, the first claim is to the vote for all adults8 and full par- ticipation and representation in all government bodies. Only through this could the other aims be realised. Second was the abolition of the pass laws and the right to freedom of movement. The 1943 Bill of Rights adds 'Recognition of the sanctity or inviolability of the home as a right of every family, and the prohibi- tion of police raids on citizens in their home for tax or liquor or other purposes'. These demands, too, are taken up in the Freedom Charter. The demand for an end to all forms of discrimination forms the economic demands of the various manifestos. Africans are to be free to enter any lawful occupations or professions. They should have the right to form trade unions, to equal pay for equal work and to equal opportunity for work. They should be protected by minimum wages and by insurance against sickness, unemployment, accidents, old age and disabilities. These rights are to be extended to farm workers, domestic workers and civil servants and, the 1946 ANC Conference added, miners. To these the Freedom Charter adds explicitly the abolition of 'forced labour and farm prisons' and of 'child labour, compound labour, the tot system and contract labour'. Like the Freedom Charter, the ANC documents (and the Ten Point Programme) make no reference to the right to strike, not even after the repression of the 1946 miners' strike. 75 Transformation Williams The 1941 Policy and Platform (Xuma, 1941) and the 1943 Bill of Rights' demand for Africans 'freedom of trading'.