Freedom Charter of South Africa

Context

The road to the passage of the Freedom Charter in 1955 may be said to have begun with the establishment of the South African Native National Congress in 1912, after decades of oppression of blacks by white South Africans. In 1910 whites had formed the Union of South Africa—an entity made up of Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and the Orange Free State under primarily British dominion. Blacks had no voice in the making of laws and no part in administration. In 1923 the congress changed its name to the African National Congress (ANC) and, in the 1940s, emerged as the leading organization opposing the policies of the racist state. After the formal introduction of apartheid—legal segregation of the races—in 1948, the ANC moved toward more direct forms of nonviolent protest.

In 1952, together with the South African Indian Congress, the ANC embarked on the Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws. In this passive resistance protest, begun on June 26, more than eight thousand people, including some whites, defied key racial laws, and many were imprisoned. Among the imprisoned was Nelson Mandela, later to be president of South Africa. The campaign petered out as the government issued a proclamation banning all meetings of more than ten Africans anywhere in the country. Soon thereafter the government enacted two laws, the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act—the first to suppress future campaigns by allowing the government to declare a state of emergency when public peace was threatened and the second to impose severe penalties, including imprisonment, fines, and whipping, for publicly protesting a law. During the campaign, membership of the ANC grew to more than one hundred thousand. For the leaders of the organization, the question was how to maintain the momentum of protest action.

At the annual conference of the Cape region of the ANC in August 1953, one of the organization's leading members, Z. K. Matthews, suggested convening a congress of people from all over the country to draw up a charter for a future South African democracy. The proposal was approved by the national conference of the ANC in December 1953. At the invitation of the ANC, a number of other antiapartheid organizations—the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People's Organisation, and the white Congress of Democrats—agreed to enter an alliance with the ANC, to be called the Congress Alliance, which then co-sponsored the Congress of the People. The Congress Alliance set up a joint action committee to plan the event, a call went out for fifty thousand “freedom volunteers” to attend, and committees were established to collect funds that would enable as many as possible to travel to Kliptown for the meeting, set to take place on June 25–26, 1955.

In a memorandum setting out his ideas for the Congress of the People, Matthews expressed the hope that the Freedom Charter to be drawn up would inspire people with fresh hope and turn their minds from negative struggles to a positive program for the future. For the first time in South African history, ordinary people were asked to take part in forming their future. A multiracial initiative, the Freedom Charter was to embody the demands and aspirations of South Africa's people as a whole, and it was hoped that those who attended the congress would in some sense represent people all across the country.

In the months before the congress convened, people were asked to put forward their wishes on pieces of paper that were then sent to the small committee that drafted the Freedom Charter. Members of this committee had in mind the People's Charter of 1838, which had called for franchise and parliamentary reform in Britain, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, but this was to be a charter specific to South Africa and a statement that presented an alternative to the apartheid order of the day. Those who drafted the Freedom Charter were inspired by the fact that representatives from the ANC and the South African Indian Congress had attended the pioneering Asian-African conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, two months before the Congress of the People was to be held. The Bandung meeting was the first to bring together those who had obtained independence from colonial rule and those still fighting for such independence. At Bandung, the representatives received encouragement from others in the third world who shared similar anticolonial views.

All who opposed apartheid were invited to attend the Congress of the People. The Liberal Party (a party without racial distinctions), anticipating that Communists, in close alliance with the ANC, would be actively involved, decided not to participate. This was a decision that many liberals later regretted, for they might have been able to influence the formers of the Freedom Charter to steer away from its more Socialist aspects.

Although the police prevented some who set out for Kliptown from attending by stopping buses heading there and claiming that the passengers did not have the necessary permits, some 2,844 delegates gathered in a dusty field close to a squatter settlement in what is now Soweto on June 25 and began to consider the Freedom Charter clause by clause, under the watching eyes of the police. Soon after the start of the afternoon session on June 26, it was announced that armed police were to search the delegates. As this process began, the rest of the charter was adopted by acclamation, and the delegates sang the ANC anthem “Nkosi Sikelele Afrika.” The police then took down the names and addresses of all the delegates.