Struggle for the Freedom Charter goes on

Mail & Guardian

5 days ago

Hope: The Freedom Charter was adopted on 26 June 1955 at Kliptown in Soweto. Its contents were drawn from submission from people all over South Africa.
The Freedom Charter was adopted in Kliptown 70 years ago, on 26 June 1955. Thousands of delegates travelled across South Africa — by train, by bus, on foot — to take part in the Congress of the People. They met under an open sky, gathered on a dusty field where a wooden stage had been erected. Armed police watched from the perimeter but the atmosphere was determined and jubilant.
One by one, the clauses of the Charter — on land, work, education, housing, democracy, peace — were read aloud, and each was met with unanimous approval. The charter distilled months of discussion and collective vision.
Discussions of the charter seldom place it in its full historical context. Yet to understand its true significance, we must see it as part of a wider global moment — an era in which oppressed peoples across the world were rising against colonialism.
After the defeat of fascism in 1945, there was a deep sense of possibility. The victory fuelled a new international moral order, embodied in the founding of the United Nations and its charter, with its emphasis on human rights, self-determination and peace. In the colonised world, this sparked a wave of anti-colonial struggle and growing demands for independence. India gained independence in 1947, China, through force of arms, in 1949 and Ghana in 1957.
In April 1955, two months before the Freedom Charter was adopted, 29 newly independent and colonised nations met in Bandung, Indonesia. The Bandung Conference gave voice to the aspirations of the Global South — to end colonialism and racial domination, assert autonomy in world affairs and build cooperation among formerly colonised peoples. Bandung thrilled anti-colonial forces globally. The Freedom Charter emerged amid this excitement.
This hopeful period was shadowed by a fierce imperial backlash. In Iran, prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh's nationalisation of oil in 1951 was met with a CIA- and MI6-backed coup in 1953. In Guatemala, president Jacobo Árbenz's land reforms provoked a similar response, and in 1954 the CIA orchestrated his removal.
Around the world, popular sovereignty was crushed to preserve imperial power. The Korean War (1950–53) marked the aggressive militarisation of the Cold War. In January 1961, Congo's first elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated with the support of the CIA. In April that year the CIA organised the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. In 1965, the US began a full-scale invasion of Vietnam. In 1966, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a Western-backed coup.
In South Africa, the vision set out in the Freedom Charter was swiftly met with state repression. Months after its adoption, 156 leaders of the Congress Alliance were arrested and charged with treason. Then came the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960. The apartheid regime banned the liberation movements underground and, in response, the ANC took the decision to turn to armed struggle.
The Freedom Charter cannot be separated from the process that gave it life — a process that was profoundly democratic and rooted in the daily lives of people. In 1953, the ANC and its partners in the Congress Alliance issued a call for a national dialogue: to ask, plainly and urgently, 'What kind of South Africa do we want to live in?'
The response was remarkable. Across the country, in townships, villages, workplaces, churches and at all kinds of gatherings, people came together to develop their demands. Submissions arrived handwritten, typed or dictated to organisers.
The charter expressed a vision of South Africa grounded in equality, justice and shared prosperity. 'The people shall govern' affirmed not only the right to vote, but the principle that power must reside with the people. 'The land shall be shared among those who work it' challenged the dispossession at the heart of colonial and apartheid rule. Crucially, the charter called for an economy based on public benefit rather than private profit: 'The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people.'
Education, housing and healthcare were to be universal and equal. The charter envisioned a South Africa without racism or sexism, where all would be 'equal before the law', with 'peace and friendship' pursued abroad.
After the banning of the liberation movements in the 1960s and the brutal repression that followed, the Freedom Charter did not disappear — but it receded from popular memory.
In the 1980s, it surged back into public life with renewed force. The formation of the United Democratic Front in 1983 in Cape Town, and the emergence of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985 in Durban, gave new organisational life to the charter. Grassroots formations drew on unions, civics and faith groups to take the charter out of the archives and the underground and into the streets. For the powerful mass movement organised in workplaces and communities the charter promised a future grounded in radical democracy and a fundamental redistribution of land and wealth.
The charter became a vital reference point for the negotiations that began after the unbanning of the liberation movements. Its language and principles profoundly shaped elements of the new Constitution.
The charter's insistence that 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it' and that 'the people shall govern' was carried through into the constitutional affirmation of non-racialism and universal suffrage. Guarantees of equal rights, human dignity and socio-economic rights such as housing, education and healthcare echo the charter's vision.
But the transition involved compromise. In the 1980s, the charter had been a call for deep structural transformation. At the settlement, key clauses — particularly those calling for the redistribution of land and the sharing of national wealth — were softened or deferred. The final settlement preserved existing patterns of private property and accepted a macroeconomic framework shaped in part by global neoliberal pressures. While the vote was won, the deeper transformations envisioned in the charter were postponed.
The result is that today, 31 years after the end of apartheid, structural inequalities and mass impoverishment remain. The charter's economic promises have not been fulfilled.
The 2024 general election marked a historic turning point. Taken together, the two dominant parties garnered support from less than a quarter of the eligible population. Nearly 60% of eligible voters did not participate.
The charter's promise that 'the people shall govern' demands more than a vote — it requires sustained participation. This requires rebuilding mass democratic participation from below. It means rekindling the culture of popular meetings, community mandates and worker-led initiatives that grounded the charter in lived experience. It means going beyond elections and restoring a sense of everyday democratic agency — in schools, workplaces and communities. It means making good on the promise to redistribute land and wealth.
It also means rebuilding solidarity across the Global South. South Africa played a leading role in the formation of the Hague Group in January this year to build an alliance in support of Palestine. This was a major breakthrough that echoed the spirit of Bandung. The meeting that the group will hold in Bogota in July promises to significantly expand its reach and power.
We must recognise the scale of resistance to transformation, both internationally and at home. The criminal attack on Iran by Israel and the United States exposes the brutality of imperial power — and the urgent need for a global counterweight.
In South Africa economic elites and NGOs, think tanks and media projects funded by Western donors often work to frame redistributive politics as illegitimate or reckless. These networks have grown bolder as ANC support has declined.
In June 2023, the Brenthurst Foundation — funded by the Oppenheimer family — convened a conference in Gdansk, Poland. Branded as a summit to 'promote democracy', the conference issued a 'Gdansk Declaration' widely read as an attempt to legitimise Western-backed opposition to redistributive politics in the Global South. The Democratic Alliance and the Inkatha Freedom Party were present, along with former Daily Maverick editor Branko Brkic and representatives of Renamo (Mozambique) and Unita (Angola), both reactionary movements that were backed by the West to violently oppose national liberation movements.
The event marked the open emergence of a transnational alliance aimed at neutralising any attempt to challenge elite power in the name of justice or equality.
It is a reminder that the struggle to realise the Freedom Charter's vision will not be won on moral terms alone. It will require effective political organisation, ideological clarity and courage. The charter was born of struggle. It must now be defended and renewed through struggle.
Ronnie Kasrils is a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and South Africa's former minister for intelligence services, activist and author.