SA's Freedom Charter

2005-06-24 13:12

Cape Town - The Freedom Charter, which turns 50 this weekend, is no stranger to controversy.

Earlier this month the Democratic Alliance's chief whip in the National Assembly, Douglas Gibson, caused a furore when he declared that most people in South Africa hardly knew about the document.

The lavish nationwide events planned to mark its anniversary were an abuse of power by the African National Congress and an abuse of public money, he said.

"Let us be clear about the Freedom Charter: it is a pamphlet drawn up by a political party - nothing more and nothing less," he said.

Gibson was accused of racism, of having shown disdain "to one of the most celebrated documents in the history of our liberation struggle", and was urged to apologise.

The ANC's perspective

The ANC has over the years constructed its own very different perspective of the document and of the Congress of the People (COP), the gathering of almost 3 000 people at Kliptown on June 25 and 26 1955, that adopted it.

In 1956 Nelson Mandela wrote of the charter: "For the first time in the history of our country the democratic forces irrespective or race [or] ideological conviction clearly defined their aims and objects and united in a common programme of action".

In a 1969 statement the ANC in exile went further: the charter was "a declaration of all the people of South Africa.

"Literally millions of people participated in the campaign and sent in their demands of the kind of South Africa they wished to live in."

And more recently, President Thabo Mbeki declared that the congress "marked the maturity of conception of the design of our future society".

'Dogged by controversy'

In truth, though, the idea of the congress was adopted only the second time around, the final version of the charter was perhaps not as clearly thought out as it could have been, and its ratification by the ANC itself was dogged by controversy.

The proposal for a congress of the people and a freedom charter was initially made to and adopted by the ANC's Cape provincial conference, and passed on to the national executive for action.

But according to contemporary activist, the communist Rusty Bernstein, it was only when its originator, Prof Z K Matthews, repeated the proposal months later that it was actually acted on.

An important part of the project was a call on ordinary South Africans to submit their demands, for inclusion in the charter.

Bernstein, who played a pivotal role in drafting the charter, talked in his 1999 memoirs Memory Against Forgetting about navigating through literally mounds of submissions that ranged from the ringing "justice for all" to what he called the "simply unclassifiable" such as "life too heavy".

A 'lopsided' structure

Using the analogy of a skeleton, he said he was faced with a lopsided structure, with a large number of, for example, labour-related submissions, but only a few on land.

"There was nothing for it but to trim, shorten or stretch the limbs to fit together into a rough approximation of a workable skeleton," he said.

"The charter required that a compromise or consensus be read from - or read into -- what was on the paper."

He said he added the preamble and the conclusion to the ten articles of the charter as "decorative trimmings" to fill the need for an "oratorical flourish" at the beginning and end.

"Perhaps I took them too casually," he said.

He said the drafting of the document was left to virtually the last minute, and was finished only days before the COP, where it was adopted unchanged.

"Since there had been no real scope for argument and resolution at the COP, the controversial elements of the charter inspired argument and disagreement after it," he said.

Mandela's version

Mandela, in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, gave a somewhat different version of the development of the document.

He talked of drafts being drawn up by ANC branches and circulated to other regions for comment, and of the final version being reviewed by the ANC's national executive.

Whatever the actual process, Mandela's friend, the writer Anthony Sampson, described the charter at the time as a "vague, haphazard document assembled from all kinds of contradictory suggestions".

After the COP the ANC itself was divided on whether it as an organisation should ratify the document.

An Africanist faction, which rejected cooperation with whites, coloureds and Indians, took issue with the colour-blind nature of the document, particularly its claim that South Africa belonged "to all who live in it, black and white".

There were also claims from both the Africanists and white liberals that it was a communist document.

A "one million signature" campaign launched in the wake of Kliptown to popularise the document was a signal failure.

Fewer than 100 000 signatures were collected, and because of the divisions, the campaign was not run at all in Natal, or in parts of the Eastern Cape and Transvaal.

The ANC national conference at the end of 1955 postponed a decision on ratification: it was only at a specially convened meeting over Easter of 1956, amid a controversy over accreditation of delegates, and scuffles between charterists and Africanists, that it was adopted.

The Africanists subsequently broke from the ANC and formed the Pan Africanist Congress and other groupings.

ANC historian Ismail Vadi quotes an anonymous leader of the time: "It took a long time to tell the people that the Freedom Charter was an important political document."

- SAPA