Freedom Charter of South Africa

Impact

After the Freedom Charter was adopted, it was taken to the various Congress Alliance organizations to be approved. In the ANC there was fierce objection to it by those who called themselves Africanists. They disliked the clause that said the country belonged to all who lived in it. They did not think that white settlers had a right to the country that was equal to the right of its indigenous inhabitants. Because of these concerns, they decided to break away from the ANC in 1958, and in April the following year they launched the Pan Africanist Congress. Members of the Pan Africanist Congress considered the Freedom Charter to be the work of white Communists and others in a multiracial alliance of which they did not approve.

Of those who attended the Congress of the People, 156 were arrested and charged with treason. In the treason trial, which ran from 1956 to 1961, a key part of the case made by the state was that the Freedom Charter presented a view of a Socialist society. The state's lawyers argued that the charter was therefore a revolutionary document and implied that revolutionary means would be used to achieve its goals. In response to such arguments, the defense argued successfully that the Freedom Charter was not Socialist and that the ANC and the other organizations in the Congress Alliance had not abandoned nonviolent forms of resistance. Nelson Mandela, one of the leading figures on trial, made it clear in his evidence that he did not see the charter as a Socialist document, though it has to be remembered that he was on trial for treason. When he was released from jail in 1990, he continued to argue the case for nationalization, based on his interpretation of the Freedom Charter.

After the last people put on trial for treason were acquitted in 1961, the year after the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress were declared unlawful organizations and forced to go underground, the Freedom Charter was relatively little referred to for many years. Although June 26 continued to be observed internationally as South African Freedom Day, mainly because it was the day on which the Freedom Charter had been adopted, it was only in the 1980s that the charter took on new significance. The United Nation's Centre against Apartheid published the charter in a brochure in June 1979 for distribution in connection with the twenty-fifth anniversary of its adoption. On January 8, 1980, in celebration of that anniversary, the ANC president Oliver Tambo characterized the charter as being a fundamental rallying cry for the liberation sought by the people of South Africa. He called it the people's charter, the essential statement of their political goals.

Long regarded as a banned document in South Africa, the Freedom Charter began to circulate widely within the country in the 1980s, and it came into prominence as a statement to which the United Democratic Front, formed in 1983, and other antiapartheid organizations committed themselves. As the country moved toward a democratic system, people looked to the Freedom Charter for inspiration and a vision of the kind of state that should be brought into being. The struggle was not only about ending apartheid but also about forging a new society based on equality, justice, and liberty. Not surprisingly, there was to be much disillusionment as it became clear that many of the ideals set out in the charter were unattainable, at least in the short run. Apartheid laws were repealed, but providing such things as free education and housing and health care for all was quite another matter. Although some slums were demolished, the number of squatter settlements and the percentage of poverty grew in the new South Africa. In 2009 there continued to be debate in South Africa over how and to what extent the ideals of the Freedom Charter could be realized.