Shadow of Liberation. Vishnu Padayachee
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 with a liberal democracy. Mandela argued in 1956 that ‘whilst the Charter proclaims democratic changes of a far-reaching nature it is by no means a blue-print for a socialist state but a programme for the unification of various classes and groupings amongst the people on a democratic basis’ (1956: 5–6). In the same article, however, Mandela asserted: ‘The Charter is more than a mere list of demands for democratic reforms. It is a revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisages cannot be won without breaking up the economic and political set-up of present South Africa’ (1956: 5). The demands of the Freedom Charter were not socialist but rather a confluence of revolutionary nationalist and social democratic approaches. This was reflected in demands for nationalisation of mineral wealth, banks and monopoly industry, which at a minimum implied an actively interventionist state. It would be in the emphasis placed on the implementation of economic and social policies that the limits of the Freedom Charter’s objectives would be revealed, as they presupposed the establishment of a democratic government sympathetic to its implementation. Luthuli’s comments to the 44th Annual Meeting of the ANC in December 1955 are instructive as to the interpretation of the Freedom Charter within the leadership of the ANC. Arguing that the Freedom Charter should be ratified (which it was eventually at a Special Conference of the ANC in April 1956), Luthuli asked:
What is the implication of the charter? The charter definitely and unequivocally visualises the establishment of a socialistic state. It therefore brings up sharply the ideological question of the kind of state the African National Congress would like to see established in the Union of South Africa.
…
My own personal leanings are towards the modified socialistic state, patterned on the present-day Great Britain, a middle-of-the-road state between the extreme ultra-capitalistic state as we see it in the United States, and the ultra-socialistic state as we see it in Communist Russia … My advice to the conference would be to accept the charter with the qualification that it does not commit itself at present until further discussion on the principle of nationalisation, of means of production, as visualised in Section 3 of the charter (in Pillay 1993: 84–85).
Luthuli explicitly identified with the social democracy of Fabian socialism as found in the post-war British Labour Party, which ushered in the welfare state. Reflecting the plurality of thinking in the ANC, he considered himself a ‘Christian socialist’ (in Pillay 1993: 32). In an interview in Drum magazine in 1953, Luthuli was asked whether he considered communism a ‘serious menace to South Africa’, to which he answered:
No, I do not. The nature of our own movement at present is Nationalist rather than Communist. There should be room for all political parties among us. At the moment we are only concerned with rescuing ourselves out of the mire, and we cannot yet say which direction we shall follow after that. For myself, I would wish for Socialism, in the British sense – if I were in England I would vote for [Clement] Attlee. But in Congress we have people of many different political beliefs – Capitalists, Socialists, and the rest … (Luthuli 1953: n.p.).
The key issue is that Luthuli identified himself as a non-communist socialist, rather than as anti-communist. In a response to an article in 1956 by prominent ANC Youth League