The changing meaning of the Freedom Charter
THE Freedom Charter is truly remarkable; it morphed without a single word changing from a capitalist to a communist document. Although the original never mentioned nationalisation or mines, it now calls for nationalised mines. It was originally a sellout to liberals; now it is a sellout to socialists. It used to say land belongs to people; now it belongs to the government. Its authors said it meant one thing; modern adherents say it means another.
According to a French proverb, “the more things change the more they stay the same”.
This is lamentably true of such apartheid dinosaurs as blacks not yet owning their land, catastrophic state-owned enterprises and the unstoppable deluge of legislative diarrhoea. But the opposite is true of the Freedom Charter. With it, the more it stays the same, the more it changes. Current consensus, especially on “the left”, is that the Freedom Charter is socialistic and that it espouses the nationalisation of land, mines, banks and other “commanding heights”. That it originally meant the opposite is clear from countless early sources, many of which are on the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) website.
As we lament Nelson Mandela’s ill-health, we can reflect on his explanation of its meaning at the time (1955). It was not “a blueprint for socialism”. Instead, Mandela said, it would “open … fields for … a prosperous non-European bourgeois” where “for the first time … non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name … mills and factories … and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before”.
Its plain English meaning also leaves little room for doubt, especially in its historical context.
It is not, as a latter-day scholar asserts, “notoriously ambiguous”. Nationalisation was the policy in virtually all countries, including SA. The “n” word was, universally, the “in” word. That the ANC studiously avoided the word must have been deliberate. Privatisation was so inconceivable that there was no word for it.
There is one, and only one, sentence that lends itself to bastardisation: “… the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the people as a whole …”.
The author of those words, Ben Turok, explained that “the word ‘nationalisation’ does not appear”.
“What was in our minds ... was (that) it was the colonial aspect the charter sought to reverse, not private ownership of property. It has never been the intention of the ANC to create a command economy by nationalisation, either then or now,” he wrote.
ANC leaders, such as Albert Luthuli, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, repeatedly refuted apartheid propaganda to the effect that the Freedom Charter and the ANC were communistic and socialistic. Former ANC president Oliver Tambo said the ANC, unlike its alliance partners, espoused capitalism.
An analyst on the ANC’s website calls the Freedom Charter “radical liberalism”.
The notion that ownership by “the people” is synonymous with nationalisation is rendered especially absurd by the rest of the Freedom Charter, including such capitalistic demands as “all people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions”. The similarity of section 23 in our constitution is no coincidence: “Every citizen has the right to choose their trade, occupation or profession freely…”. Both documents are consistent with, and only with, capitalism.
More perverse than reading nationalisation of business into the Freedom Charter is nationalisation of land. In this 100th year after the 1913 Natives Land Act, “the struggle” was, if anything, against the nationalisation of “black” land under apartheid and blacks being forced to live, as most do to this day, on nationalised land.
There is no historically valid sense in which blacks will be truly liberated without liberation from nationalisation, regarding which, the more things change the more they stay the same.
Louw is executive editor of the Free Market Foundation.