of the anti-colonial struggle in Africa and Asia in the post-war era. Largely based on a broad allegiance to the communist ideology of the Second International and Third International, this approach was rarely debated. The nature of the economic transformation was mostly taken as obvious, flowing from the expected collapse of capitalism under its inherent contradictions and a more or less seamless transition to socialism. ANC comrades on Robben Island, in South Africa generally and in exile benefited from reading Maurice Cornforth, Maurice Dobb, George Padmore and Eric Williams, among others, writers whose works revolved around anti-colonial and anti-segregationist struggles in various parts of the world (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).1 As Mac Maharaj observes:
I can only speak from my recollection of what the kinds of issues were that we were living in the 50s when I became active, and the 60s. And I think that the mood in the 1950s, not only in the left movement but in the broad anti-colonial movement, was that the question of the transformation of society, particularly the economic transformation, had certain easy answers. And those easy answers were largely based on the experience of the Second and Third Internationals. Even the debate from the Fourth International assumed that that transformation is an easy thing to achieve (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
According to Mlangeni, discussions on the Island among ANC prisoners were ‘based purely on the Freedom Charter’. They seemed largely to be restatements of the intentions of the Freedom Charter and the non-racial society based on equality it sought to create with little attention to the policies, programmes or mechanisms by which this was to be achieved:
We said, if we achieve what is said in the Freedom Charter, we’ll have achieved the kind of South Africa, a society in South Africa that we’d like to see emerge, a society where people are equal … We want the land which was largely owned by white people, to be owned by all the people of South Africa, there must be equal distribution of the land among all the people of South Africa, for example. People must be equal before the law, something which did not happen before, the judiciary, the judges, the magistrates must treat black people the same way they treat white people in court, you must be treated as a human being (Mlangeni interview, 6 October 2015).
Mlangeni revealingly indicates that when the Freedom Charter clause on nationalisation was debated on Robben Island, his original view that it represented a socialist proposal was disavowed during the discussion.
At first I also had the same view that nationalisation of the mineral resources, etc., is socialism but further discussions, more discussions on the Island proved to us that no, it doesn’t mean that we are introducing socialism in South Africa. It simply means that banks and mineral resources must be shared among those who work it; it doesn’t mean introducing socialism … I also had that interpretation that it meant that the resources must be shared among the people of South Africa (Mlangeni interview, 6 October 2015).
It is a moot point whether discussions of the Freedom Charter on the Island, in which Mandela was a key figure, opened up or closed down the powerful social democratic impetus in the thinking of Albert Luthuli over the period of the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, as discussed in chapter 2. It would seem from the available evidence (including from Long Walk to Freedom) that Mandela was politically cautious and privileged the multi-class alliance politics of the ANC in the context of the imperatives of national liberation. Luthuli went much further to engage with the implications of the social democratic path he advocated, unequivocally locating a central role for labour in such a social democratic agenda of social compacting.
Of course, the conditions for any such open debate among comrades on Robben Island were very constrained for many obvious reasons. Among other factors were that the ANC leadership (the High Organ) was physically separated from other political prisoners and because of the limitations of prison life in South Africa under grand apartheid (Kathrada interview, 9 October 2015). This is how Maharaj describes the conditions:
Look at it from the point of view of the prisoners in those circumstances. I left in 1976; by 1978 they had stopped taking them to the quarry to work. You’re now roaming around in the single cells fairly freely, you can play sports, you’ve got a dining room, you can sit down and discuss and slowly more newspapers are becoming available, but that’s only what you’re getting. So, your information is extremely patchy. It is not sufficient to make any solid study of any problem. There is no in-depth debate, there is no continuity in your reading (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
‘Inqindi and Marxism’
Kathrada, who admitted to knowing little about economics, pointed out that little or no economic or social policy debates occurred on Robben Island in the first ten to twelve years after 1964. The Freedom Charter, including its economic clauses as approved by the ANC in 1956, was accepted without question. However, in the later 1970s, after the Soweto student protests, many young ANC cadres arrived on the Island. After they fled South Africa, they had been trained in countries such as the German Democratic Republic. These young comrades contributed to a revival in discussions about both political strategy and (to some extent and indirectly) economic policy. The meaning and value of the Freedom Charter in changing circumstances became a subject of intense debate (Kathrada interview, 9 October 2015).
It seems that the coming to power of ‘Marxist’ parties in both Angola and Mozambique in the mid-1970s was also a powerful lever to reopen these debates. While the two-stage theory of revolution and internal colonialism was not directly raised, the question that arose was: if the Angolans and Mozambicans could take the great leap from essentially peasant societies to Marxism-Leninism, why not South Africa? Could South Africa, too, not take one big step to socialism? (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
It was in that context that the document that came to be called ‘Inqindi and Marxism’ was drafted. Inqindi is an isiZulu and isiXhosa word meaning ‘fist’. Little has been written about this milestone document that was produced and circulated on Robben Island after 1978. It is not even certain who wrote the first draft, or who edited it. Kathrada tells us that he acted as something of a go-between among prisoners in the drafting of the document (Kathrada interview, 9 October 2015).
According to Kathrada, Mandela and his comrades in B section had a first stab at it, and later, after comments were received from comrades in other sections, he was tasked with liaising with as many comrades as he could and writing the final version, incorporating all comments. There were two main aims of producing the document. The first was to encourage all comrades, whether from the ANC or the South African Communist Party (SACP), to study Marxism. The second aim was to remind comrades of the difference between a national struggle and class struggle (Gerhart and Glaser 2010: 492–497). The core of the arguments in ‘Inqindi’ relate to the role of the working class in the struggle, and from there about whether the struggle was for a nationalist or a socialist future. There was a debate about the use and meaning of the phrases such as a ‘national bourgeoisie’, ‘national democracy’ and ‘bourgeois democratic republic’, which were used in drafts.
For us here it is important to realise that one element of the debate was to understand the economic basis of class conflict through ‘scientific knowledge’. However, there was no elaboration on this point and we are no wiser from studying the document about how far forward it took the understanding about the nature and character of the struggle. On one point, however, it is clearer and more interesting: ‘Unlike Marxism which guides a CP [communist party] before and after the taking of power, the role of African nationalism is limited to the pre-liberation phase of the struggle. It cannot be used to reshape society after liberation, nor for the purpose of developing a new mode of production different from capitalism or socialism, as some political organisations claim’ (Gerhart and Glaser 2010: 497).
In the end, it could only be claimed that the document asserts the dynamic nature and flexibility of the Freedom Charter and its value to the struggle over two decades after Kliptown
