Mlangeni, last surviving member of the Robben Island group of Rivonia Trialists and a member of the CPSA and the ANC in the 1950s, was based in Dube, Soweto. His reflection on the ANC’s preoccupation with national liberation objectives to the virtual exclusion of deliberations on economic policy is telling:
You know in the 1950s, especially after the Defiance Campaign, the ANC was emphasising freedom, freedom for the people of South Africa, but in particular, the black people. There wasn’t so much talk about the economic position of the country, what the policy of the ANC was on the economy of the country. What was being emphasised was largely freedom, that we must be free to elect a government of our own like the white people at the time. So that we can live as the white people of South Africa lived at the time. In the branches of the African National Congress not much was being discussed about the economy of the country. Things only changed after the Freedom Charter was adopted (Mlangeni interview, 6 October 2015).
In 1952, Albert Luthuli became the president general, and he was to lead the ANC until his death in 1967. Luthuli commented in 1952 on the shift to militant opposition around citizenship demands as follows:
In so far as gaining citizenship rights and opportunities for the unfettered development of the African people, who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of my many years of moderation? Has there been any reciprocal tolerance or moderation from the Government, be it Nationalist or United Party? No! On the contrary, the past thirty years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all: no adequate land for our occupation, our only asset, cattle, dwindling, no security of homes, no decent and remunerative employment, more restriction to freedom of movement through passes, curfew regulations, influx control measures; in short we have witnessed in these years an intensification of our subjection to ensure and protect white supremacy.
It is with this background and with a full sense of responsibility that, under the auspices of the African National Congress (Natal), I have joined my people in the new spirit that moves them today, the spirit that revolts openly and boldly against injustice and expresses itself in a determined and non-violent manner (in Pillay 1993: 47).
What accounts for this displacement in the ANC from a concerted attempt to develop economic and social policies under Xuma in the 1940s, leading to the social democratic formulations of African Claims, to the relative policy barrenness of the 1950s, leading up to the Freedom Charter of 1955? A telling reason could be the combination of increased repression under the apartheid regime and weariness with constitutionally bound protests, with a more militant political leadership emerging in the ANC. Turok explained it as follows:
Now you see, a leadership is sensitive to the mood of the people. My guess … is that the masses were tired of a respectable ANC, and Mandela and Tambo and company reflected this tiredness. We want to go all out. Don’t forget, the regime was more and more repressive. Things were getting rougher and rougher, and pass laws were tougher and so on. What you’ve got to do is also look at the social protest period, and see under this policy thing was there a different dimension, subterranean? And I suspect you’ll find that. The Miners’ Strike [of 1946] certainly shows that all this talk about nation-building representivity, inclusiveness and all this, underneath all that there were miners who were saying, ‘To hell with this’ … Underneath these statements there was a kind of fatigue. The Fort Hare protests3 shows you that they [the ANC Youth League members such as Mandela and Tambo] were willing to be sacked from Fort Hare and they were … all that stuff shows that they were not at all impressed by this nation-building and representivity and the African Claims language. There was an undercurrent of fatigue, I suspect (Turok interview, 31 May 2014).
This period of militant opposition was met with a repressive response from the National Party and the introduction of legislation that curbed civil and political rights. These included the Suppression of Communism Act No. 44 of 1950; the Criminal Law Amendment Act No. 8 of 1953, which was aimed at anyone who protested against the repeal or modification of any law; and the Riotous Assemblies Act No. 17 of 1956, which prohibited public gatherings in open spaces if they threatened the public peace (SAIRR 1978: 418, 431).
In this climate of repression, social policy, the public good, was subordinated to the political objective of achieving an unqualified franchise. Nevertheless, in the period of the mass-based political activism of the 1950s, the ANC was moving to formalise its position on the place of democracy, social policy and the public good in relation to the state in a post-apartheid nation. This took the form of a public Congress of the People in 1955 in Kliptown, which inaugurated the Freedom Charter and which the ANC, with the SACP, were instrumental in organising. The Freedom Charter gave expression to the increasingly militant civil disobedience campaigns in favour of civil and political rights, such as the Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws of 1952. The Freedom Charter contained a series of demands framed by the primary citizenship demand – ‘The People Shall Govern’. In addition to civil and political rights, it contained demands for social rights consistent with social democracy, including rights related to income; state-provided education, which would be free; universal housing; and free state-provided medical care.
These were framed specifically as follows:
•The state shall recognise the right and duty of all to work, and to draw full unemployment benefits; Men and women of all races shall receive equal pay for equal work; There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, and sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers.
•Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit.
•All people shall have the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security; Unused housing space to be made available to the people; Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no-one shall go hungry; A preventive health scheme shall be run by the state (Freedom Charter 1955 in Karis and Carter 1987: 205–208).
The Freedom Charter contained demands about the control of wealth, which were predicated on public ownership and nationalisation as the mechanism to achieve it: ‘The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people; the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole’ (Freedom Charter 1955 in Karis and Carter 1987: 206).
Gavin Williams (1988: 81) argues convincingly that there are important continuities between the Freedom Charter and previous ANC statements, such as the Bill of Rights of African Claims, in that they both represented the interests of working people who were ‘unified by the structures of racial discrimination and oppression’. Williams further makes the point that ‘the Freedom Charter was distinctive in explicitly claiming South Africa for all its people, in its concern for the rights of all “nationalities” among the people and in taking up demands of women … and it puts forward a cogent series of declarations which resonate with a wide range of people’s experiences and aspirations in a way that no previous documents ever did’ (1988: 80).
The Freedom Charter represented a programme for a future post-apartheid society, but did not specify how this was to be achieved. Its declamatory tone suggested that it would involve a protracted political struggle, and its ideals would not be the subject of negotiation. Substantively, the goals of the Freedom Charter could not be achieved without a redistribution of wealth and resources between the white minority and the black majority. However, this does not imply that the major beneficiaries would necessarily be the working class and the poor, as the Freedom Charter was not a class-based, socialist programme; it incorporated demands on individual rights to land and property that were compatible
