the foundations of a new union, a non-racial democracy, belonging to all South Africans, and in line with the United Nations Charter and the views of all enlightened people everywhere in the world’ (in Karis and Carter 1987: 573).
The banning of the ANC in 1960 put an end to the possibility of dialogue between the opposition movement and the government on a democratic constitutional order, based on a universal franchise. The banned ANC was left with no alternative but to rely on mass mobilisation and underground forms of struggle as a means of overthrowing the apartheid regime, including the use of armed struggle.
By 1962, Luthuli was more categorical about the form of interventions that the state should support to realise the post-apartheid good society. In an article entitled ‘If I were Prime Minister’, published in the United States in Ebony magazine in February 1962, he offered economic and social policy proposals that unambiguously reflected his intention to establish a social democratic welfare state in South Africa if he was made prime minister:
The solution to the South African problem will call for radical reforms, some of them of a really revolutionary nature. The basic reform will be in the form of the government. At present, there is a government by whites only. This should be replaced by a government which is truly a government of all the people, for the people, and by the people. This can only be so in a state where all adults – regardless of race, colour or belief – are voters. Nothing but such a democratic form of government, based on the parliamentary system, will satisfy (Luthuli 1962: 21).
Indicating his own preference for a state based on social democracy, Luthuli argued that to address the ‘man-made inequality’ of apartheid ‘will demand what will appear to whites in South Africa to be revolutionary changes. Some form of a system such as is found in Great Britain and Sweden might meet the case’ (Luthuli 1962: 22).
Luthuli then expressed the mechanisms that the state would employ to achieve its social democratic policy goals of free education, affordable municipal housing and state-provided employment for ‘the bulk of people’, who would also enjoy unqualified rights to unionisation:
It is inevitable that nationalization and control – even on a larger scale than now – would be carried out by the government of the day after freedom, if justice is to be done to all, and the state enabled to carry out effectively its uplift work … State control will be extended to cover the nationalization of some sectors of what at present is private enterprise. It will embrace specifically monopoly industries, the mines and banks, but excluding such institutions as building societies (Luthuli 1962: 23).
Luthuli then advocated that the new government should have as its objective the creation of a ‘democratic social welfare state’: ‘I realize that a state such as I visualize – a democratic social welfare state – cannot be born in one day. But it will be the paramount task of the government to bring it about and advance it without crippling industry, commerce, farming and education’ (1962: 26, emphasis added).
Most tellingly the article reveals that Luthuli had given some thought to the actual policies that the state would employ in order to achieve its goals that were consistent with social democracy. These included government regulation and nationalisation of the private sector; redistributive rates of taxation; and protection of workers’ right to strike, concomitant with the entitlements associated with ‘social compacting’-type accords between labour, the state and enterprise as found in Scandinavian social democracies and the post-war British Labour Party under Clement Attlee, which ushered in the welfare state:
•Private enterprises, commerce and industry would be under government control as now, and probably stricter. Supertax on all high incomes should be levied on a higher percentage than now to meet the needs of uplifting the oppressed of former days.
•State control should be extended to cover the nationalisation of some sectors of what at present is private enterprise.
•Human rights as declared by the United Nations would be entrenched in the State Constitution.
•All workers would enjoy unqualified trade union rights with a charter laying down minimum wages and conditions. There would be no discrimination on grounds of colour or race. Merit would be the qualifying factor.
•The present framework of industrial legislation in so far as it applies to Whites would form the basis of industrial legislation. Workers would have the right to strike, for even if strikes might be costly and wasteful, it gives the individual a greater security if he knows he has the right, and it makes him feel a partner in the undertaking (Luthuli 1962: 23, emphasis added).
The discourse within the ANC between 1940 and 1962 as reflected in its key policy documents and the thinking of its presidents on a future state that could overcome the legacies of segregation and apartheid were premised on a state form that was democratic and would intervene in the economy to secure redistributive social policies in health, education and welfare. The substantive form of such a state was a social democratic welfare state. This is reflected in the policy formulations of the 1955 Freedom Charter, which demonstrated a reconnection with the inclusive discourse of the 1943 African Claims, and unequivocally in social policy with a social democratic idea of the post-apartheid ‘good society’.
The evidence from ANC policy literature and the reflections of key ANC thinkers and leaders such as Xuma and Luthuli (neither of whom were members of the CPSA) reveal that the ANC had an unmistakably social democratic view of the post-segregation and post-apartheid ‘good society’. Veterans such as Turok, Ahmed Kathrada and Mlangeni, whom we interviewed, confirm this picture of an ANC that was strongly committed to a society and an economy where the interests of the poor, marginalised, oppressed and exploited were to be the main focus of its work in any future democratic government, where it would rest with the state to drive this process through redistributive economic and social policies. Whether they articulated this as social democracy or socialism or something else matters less than the essential substance of the thinking and ideas.
The debate on ANC economic and social policies for a post-apartheid society, such as they were before 1994, were to evolve in three distinctive locales: Robben Island, the exile community and, in the latter part of the 1980s and 1990s, within South Africa. The following chapter reveals some telling observations from Mlangeni on the narrowing interpretations of the ‘nationalisation’ clause of the Freedom Charter as discussed among the imprisoned ANC comrades. It suggests that the more radical social democratic impetus, advocated by Luthuli up until and shortly following the banning of the ANC in 1961, would not be developed much further. The primary imperative of national liberation, based on a multi-class alliance of the oppressed, dominated the discourse of the ANC and eclipsed the clearly articulated policy proposals developed by Xuma and Luthuli.
CHAPTER
3
Incarceration, Exile and Homecoming, c.1960–c.1991
In 1961, the ANC was declared a banned organisation. Many of its leaders were arrested; others had to go underground or flee the country for Lusaka, London and other parts of the world sympathetic to their cause. The years that followed required a whosesale reorganistion of the movement in a difficult global context dominated by Cold War considerations. The West provided little support for the ANC, while offering considerable financial and political support to the apartheid regime. The role of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in tipping off the South African authorites about Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts, which led to his arrest near Howick, Natal, in August 1962, has been well documented. The US Consul in Durban, Donald Rickard, was the CIA operative who provided the information. The arrest had the effect of seriously setting back the struggle against the apartheid regime (Garcia 2016: n.d.). In London, Oliver Tambo secured a base for the ANC,
