old age pensions, family allowances, national health and unemployment insurances …’ (Padmore 1963: 60).
The anti-fascist ‘war years’ thus created a global climate for the investigation of radical social reform ideas of a social democratic character. These ideas were seized upon by intellectuals in the black opposition movements in South Africa, such as AB Xuma, a public health doctor and president general of the ANC between 1940 and 1949. The convergence on the need for fundamental social reforms in South Africa between the Xuma-led ANC and the segregationist, liberal, white ruling United Party of Smuts was made possible by the acceptance of the Atlantic Charter’s provision for post-war democratisation and the extension of social security to all nations under nazi and fascist occupation. The United Party supported this objective globally and joined the war on the Allied side in 1940, while the ANC produced a citizenship charter in 1943, African Claims, which related the Atlantic Charter to the lack of democracy and social rights for blacks in South Africa. Both groups, for very different strategic reasons, hoped the implementation of the Atlantic Charter would be beneficial for post-war South Africa.
AFRICAN CLAIMS IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1943
The impact of the international rights-based Atlantic Charter of 1941, which established the political foundations for a post-war settlement, had a major influence on South African opposition political movements. In particular, its call to ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; … and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’, as well as its advocacy of inclusive social policy aimed at ‘securing, for all, improved labour standards, economic advancement and social security’ (Borgwardt 2002: 46), was applied to South Africa in the ANC’s 1943 document, African Claims in South Africa. Leaders of the ANC, such as Xuma and ZK Matthews, were already exposed to a social rights discourse through their educational activities at liberal universities and intellectual engagements with liberals and civil rights activists in the US and Britain in the 1930s. For example, following the completion of his medical studies, Xuma gave a speech entitled ‘Bridging the Gap between White and Black’, which compared the position of blacks and whites in South Africa against an American ideal, and which gave ‘hope and citizenship rights to all alike’ (in Walshe 1970: 60). They were thus acutely interested in the implications for blacks in South Africa of the advocacy of global democratisation and social citizenship by Allied leaders, the US in particular, in opposition to fascism and nazism.
The African Claims policy framework for a social democratic future was firmly rooted in the intellectual traditions of the ANC. This was reflected in the Atlantic Charter Committee of 1943, assembled by Xuma to prepare the provisions of the African Claims document. The committee included leading figures of the African intelligentsia, such as the chairperson, ZK Matthews (executive member of the ANC); James Calata (secretary general of the ANC); Moses Kotane (general secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa [CPSA]1 and member of the ANC); Govan Mbeki (trade secretary of the Federation of Organised Bodies in Transkei); Edwin Mofutsanyana (member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC and member of the CPSA); Gana Makabeni, trade unionist and president of the Council of Non-European Trade Unions); Pixley ka Isaka Seme (attorney and member of the ANC National Executive Committee); RV Selope Thema (editor of Bantu World, member of the Native Representative Council and speaker of the ANC); and AB Xuma (president general of the ANC). The thinking of the Atlantic Charter Committee was distilled in African Claims in South Africa, the most significant statement by the ANC in the war years on the new post-war ‘good society’, based on black enfranchisement and social rights of citizenship. Its strategic political intervention was to apply political, civil and social rights, which were advocated in the Atlantic Charter and endorsed by the ruling United Party, to the disenfranchised black people in South Africa.
The section on a Bill of Rights in African Claims echoed the American Declaration of Independence. It set out the most unequivocal statement of African expectations for full, unqualified rights to citizenship: ‘We, the African people in the Union of South Africa, urgently demand the granting of full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa’ (ANC 1943: 217). The Bill of Rights then stipulated in greater detail the content of such citizenship, its specificity worth citing in some detail:
•civil rights: ‘To equal justice in courts of law, including nominations to juries and appointment as judges, magistrates and other court officials’; ‘Freedom of movement, and the repeal of the pass laws’. ‘The right to own, buy, hire or lease and occupy land and all other forms of … property.’
•political rights, based on: ‘Abolition of political discrimination based on race … and the extension to all adults, regardless of race, of the right to vote and be elected to parliament, provincial councils and other representative institutions’; ‘The right to be appointed to and hold office in the civil service and in all branches of public employment.’
•social rights, based on: ‘The establishment of free medical and health services for all sections of the population’; ‘The right of every child to free and compulsory education and of admission to technical schools, universities and other institutions of higher education’; ‘Equality of treatment with any other section of the population in the State social services, and the inclusion on an equal basis with Europeans in any scheme of social security’; ‘That the African worker … be insured against sickness unemployment, accidents, old age and for all other physical disabilities arising from the nature of their work; the contributions to such insurance should be borne entirely by the government and the employers’; ‘The extension of all industrial welfare legislation to Africans engaged in Agriculture, Domestic Service and in Public institutions or bodies’ (ANC 1943: 217–221).
The ANC’s 1943 Bill of Rights started from civil rights. These, in turn, led directly to political rights and finally to recognition of social rights. These claims prefigured TH Marshall’s famous 1950 essay on citizenship and social class and the political evolution of civil, political and social rights through three consecutive stages (Marshall 1950). It represented the most significant statement on non-racial, universal rights of citizenship in the period of the 1940s, and, in its universality and focus on state-provided ‘public goods’, unambiguously represented the origins of inclusive social democratic thinking and a concomitant social democratic development path for post-segregation South African society.
However, for the ANC, led by Xuma, the absence of political enfranchisement of blacks revealed the limits of liberalisation and the possibilities for a broadly social democratic reform agenda suggested in the early war years. The authors of African Claims were not naive in their belief that the radical claims made would be acceded to. In the document’s preface, Xuma states: ‘As African leaders we are not so foolish as to believe that because we have made these declarations that our government will grant us our claims for the mere asking. We realise that for the African this is only a beginning of a long struggle entailing great sacrifices of them, means and even life itself. To the African people the declaration is a challenge to organise and unite themselves under the mass liberation movement, the African National Congress’ (ANC 1943: 210).
After repeated failed attempts to secure a meeting with Smuts to discuss the implications of the Atlantic Charter, Xuma sent him a copy of African Claims and its Bill of Rights (Gish 2000). After reading the document, Smuts sent a reply to Xuma through his private secretary, Henry Cooper, in September 1944, rejecting African Claims as a ‘propagandistic document intended to propagate the views of your Congress … [The prime minister] … does not agree with your effort to stretch its meaning so as to make it apply to all sorts of African problems and conditions. That is an academic affair which does not call for any intervention on his part …’ (in Gish 2000: 129). The failure to implement inclusive social policies demonstrated the limits of social citizenship based on social democratic ideas in the absence of civil and political rights.
By 1945, the possibility of developing and implementing progressive
