60th Anniversary of the people’s lodestar, the Freedom Charter.
JOHANNESBURG: The great Struggle activists of the 1980s drew inspiration from the Freedom Charter, as they still do today.
With today being the 60th anniversary of the people’s document, the Cape Times’s sister paper, The Star, interviewed three stalwarts:.
At that time, in the 1980s, almost everything was illegal, so most people – if you wanted to talk to them and try to get information about what happened – were worried you might have been sent by the Special Branch; even basic information could be very hard to come by.
Something many people maybe don’t realise was the role the church played in racial reconciliation. The church teaches the idea that all of us are made in the image of God, so all human beings are the same. That context allowed us to debate what we were going to do, what kind of future we were going to have, just like the people who developed the Freedom Charter.
I look back to 1971, when there was a general students conference to outline the policy position of the SA Students Organisation (Saso), and many students came from various Christian organisations too, many of us Catholics, who had been schooled in a non-racial approach.
So Saso drew up a manifesto. Clause 3, if I remember well, said we believed South Africa was a country in which black and white would live. We were so cut off, the Freedom Charter was not freely available, but our sentiments then were the same as in 1955.
As we started to learn more about it, a lot of its arguments became very important. We could see that, even then, people were not saying all white people were the same, they were saying we must have non-racialism.
There were people in the church who had been there at the time of the signing of the Freedom Charter, and they were great advocates for it. I quickly made my move to the ANC where there was intensive debate among prisoners on Robben Island about the issues it raised.
We mustn’t forget the ANC is a liberation movement. It remains a liberation movement, not a political party, so we were quickly disabused of the thinking that there would be one economic order in the future.
The ANC is and was a multi-class formation, not a class-based organisation, fighting for democracy, so businessmen, workers, peasants, the middle class, everybody was welcome.
Most important was to make sure everybody had the right to vote: that was the most urgent issue. Other issues could always be dealt with; we first had to open society up.
We believed firmly that the whole thing about the Freedom Charter was that it was not a dogma, but an enunciation of what is achievable. We need to remain creative enough as a collective to build on it and reach our liberty.
Now the leader of Cope, during apartheid Lekota faced charges of high treason, served a term on Robben Island and was a leading figure in the black consciousness movement, the UDF and the ANC. Jeremy Cronin
I like the word “imagination” when we consider the Freedom Charter because it literally took thousands of volunteers around the country collecting demands – and it got done.
Imagine a road construction gang in 1955 being asked: if you were the government, what would you do? It was quite a leap of the imagination in the midst of white minority rule to pose even that idea. It’s very moving, and it wasn’t just the document, but the process.
What South Africa needs collectively once again, is that kind of inspiring vision. Often we get sucked into the complexities and the grubbiness of the present, with its many complications.
But it’s so important in our history – that consultative process.
And it came out of that collection of demands when some came in on the backs of brown paper wrappers, like bits of liberating thought.
Post-1994, there have been lots of good intentions in the message that often comes from the government and the ANC, of which I am a member, that we are in government now and we will deliver. Clearly government must, with determination and strategic purpose, use the resources we have to transform our country, but often the message is too much a top-down one of delivery.
The spirit of the Freedom Charter was that the people shall govern, not that this or that party that wins the elections shall govern. But I think it’s been attenuated in many ways.
When we look again at the second clause of the Freedom Charter – the people shall govern – it talks about one person, one vote, everyone having a right to participate in the administration. Interestingly, its last sentence says all bodies of minority rule shall be replaced by democratic organs of self-government.
So we believe government is not just about elections or the ruling parties, although that’s important.
It’s also about active communities participating… that could be school governing bodies, community policing forums, ward committees.
What we’ve got is the tradition of Struggle which hasn’t disappeared, but in some communities, this has been stuck in protest mode, which we now typically describe as service deliveries.
It can feel inward-looking people bashing other people, while the tradition suggests it should be about communities – in this time of history, maybe cleaning up their own areas or contributing in some way.
The idea was always of people being their own self-emancipators and taking a collective responsibility for governing.
I’m not saying the government should be let off the hook, but we need to recover the spirit of the Freedom Charter and the popular struggles of the 1980s – a collective activism which needs to be affirmed. That had a unique authority.
Now the Deputy Minister of Public Works and an ANC and SACP leader, Cronin was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment during apartheid on charges under the Terrorism and Internal Security Acts. A noted writer and poet, he coauthored 30 Years of the Freedom Charter with Raymond Suttner in 1986. Lulu Johnson
In 1980, I was locked up on a Section 22, which was a 14-day detention spell. You would be picked up by the cops, identified as a so-called ring-leader because you were part of class boycotts.
I found an object in that police cell in Port Elizabeth to write with, and I wrote the clauses of the Freedom Charter on the door. Because I was there alone, the intention was more than demonstrating the fact that one knew the clauses. It was also to popularise the Freedom Charter for those who were to come after you or would be joining you.
Remember, the Freedom Charter was banned at the time. How many lashes I had to endure over that! It was quite painful. You strip and bear those blows.
Really, 1982 would have been the period in which we started taking the Freedom Charter seriously. The student organisations would have had those festivals typically in July and also in December. Those were very, very fruitful, wherein you had a two-week period where nothing else was to be entertained save for festivities of ideas. Among others, it would have been the Freedom Charter itself.
I remember very well at Wits attending one of those when Helen Joseph was speaking about the Freedom Charter, having been there herself. Another star was Uncle Curtis Nkondo, when we were engaged in those discussions on the Freedom Charter. He was an educationist and really big on dissecting the clause about opening the doors of learning.
We were experiencing apartheid colonial education at the time, and we were, through those debates, agreeing on a process of what we wanted a change in education to be.
The importance of the charter in this day and age cannot be overemphasised. At best, what we do here today, we only talk to statistics. You know, X number of pupils having passed and whether others are going to college or not.
Even in Mozambique, they were already talking from 1975, fresh from their liberation, about education for liberation.
The same happened in Cuba and also in Bolivia, there’d been talk about education playing a very, very cardinal role as far as nation-building is concerned. Those people were nurtured into an understanding.
And that’s what we were trying to do by studying the Freedom Charter. At one stage, we had to spend a period of six months just learning it, studying it. At one time, we spent one week just on the clause: the people shall govern. What do we mean? Who are the people? Who is to be governed? Nowadays, we typically spend half a day discussing something, as if that’s enough.
We can, with pride, say that the ANC really did a lot in terms of investing in a number of us in our generation. We were very keen to listen, very keen to learn. We were very disciplined, the people among us. It’s not always like that now.
All the clauses talk to a need to transform our society and to bring it on to that pedestal, which was created for us in 1955.
An ANC MP, Johnson was president and general secretary of Cosas during apartheid, and the second ANC Youth League president after 1990.