Are we all one nation now?
THIS will be the last column on the series I promised to dedicate to a conversation on the Freedom Charter in the light of the current month having been declared the Month of the Freedom Charter. I discuss a concept I consider rather important: national groups.
Because of the mode of political organisation in the 1950s and because of the way in which the Congress of the People was constituted, the notion of “national groups” is deeply embedded in the Freedom Charter. Therefore the charter states: “All national groups shall have equal rights”.
But how must the concept of “national groups” be understood? The practical difficulty occasioned by the notion was thrown up by the negotiations at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park in the 1990s.
The white right wing demanded a volks chamber and the right of the Afrikaner to national self-determination. In a paper prepared for the 50th national conference of the ANC in 1997, Pallo Jordan records that at these negotiations the ANC was “compelled to consider . . . accommodating the demand for a volks chamber on the part of the white ultra-right”.
He raises the question whether the concession meant the ANC accepted that the white right wing was entitled to “national independence”. Put differently, was there a national question vis-à-vis the white right wing in South Africa?
Predictably, Jordan disputes both the existence of a white national question in South Africa and that the ANC might have conceded its existence. If Jordan is right, then we have to ask: what does the Freedom Charter mean when it asserts that “all national groups shall have equal rights”?
If one must remain faithful to the manner in which our politics evolved in South Africa, one must accept that throughout the liberation struggle, there was a tension between those who argued the four-nations thesis on the one hand and those who argued the two-nations thesis on the other, and those who postulated the national question in the future tense. Those who argued the four-nations thesis thought the four nations of South Africa were the whites, Africans, coloureds and Indians.
This was the position of the congress movement. Those who argued the two-nations thesis asserted that South Africa had two nations: whites and blacks.
This was the position of the black consciousness movement. The dominant Trotskyist position was that there was no nation in South Africa, but that the product of the liberation struggle would be the creation of one.
When one takes these views on the national question into account, the inference seems unescapable that when the Freedom Charter asserted the equal rights of “all national groups”, it was saying, in effect, that Africans, coloureds, Indians and whites would have equal rights. If these rights, to which all national groups are entitled, are articulated in unqualified terms, and we are told that we have equal access to them, then Jordan’s contention becomes conceptually difficult.
If the rights of all the groups are equal and the right of national self-determination is included in them, then all the groups have the right of national self-determination. When this conceptual difficulty arises, one has a three-way choice: one can stand by the postulates of the charter and concede that whites (as a national group) are entitled to national self-determination.
(It would then be a matter of choice for individual white persons how they exercise that right.) Or one can amend the charter and remove the basis for the validity of the national question in respect of the “groups” which constitute the South African nation.
Or one can withdraw one’s support for the charter, to the extent that one does not agree with the consequence it leads to. But one cannot have it both ways.
Obviously the clause was meant to protect all South Africans against prejudice based on who they are (in a free South Africa). But the way South Africa has evolved after 1994 is that we all seem to accept that we are one nation – South Africans!
We must ask therefore: is it logically necessary to imagine the idea of “national groups” to afford protection against the hazards of racial or ethnic prejudice? If one concedes the need to protect fellow South Africans against such hazards, does it follow that one must therefore embrace the idea of “national groups”?
Let us ask the same question a little differently: is it not, precisely, people who operate with the notion of “national groups”, or some variant of it, who have in the past shown the inclination to embark on ethnic cleansing and who are, therefore, more likely to do precisely what we seek to protect people against?
If our intention, in postulating “national groups” is to protect all South Africans against all forms of discrimination, then I contend that we plant the seeds for the opposite result in creating a consciousness of otherness through the notion of “national groups”. The assertion of the existence of “national groups” and the suggestion that they might have rights which depend on who they are in relation to others in the same geo-political space appear to me to be antithetical to the cultivation of a single national consciousness.
The cultivation of a single national consciousness (that we are all South Africans) might in the final analysis be the most effective protection against any “national group” being persecuted for no other reason but being who it is.