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IOL News
2 days ago
- Politics
- IOL News
'The Short End of the Stick': A Bikoian Rejection of Freedom Charter Nostalgia
The Congress of the People was organised by the National Action Council, a multi-racial organisation that later became known as the Congress Alliance. It was held in Kliptown on June 26, 1955, to lay out the vision of the South African people. Swaminathan Gounden was one of the Natal delegates who attended the Congress under the leadership of Archie Gumede. Image: Swaminathan Gounden Collection There is a dangerous return to nostalgia in post-apartheid South Africa. The Freedom Charter, long treated as a sacred relic of liberation, is again being celebrated by figures like Ronnie Kasrils, who now serve as gatekeepers of Struggle memory. This reverence is not a harmless sentiment. It masks the failures of elite transition and conceals the betrayals of the democratic settlement. The Freedom Charter did not chart a path to Black liberation. It opened the door for a managed transfer of power that preserved the material base of colonial capital while installing a comprador elite to manage the contradictions. Steve Biko warned against precisely this ideological trap. No matter what modifications are made to the status quo, the Black man will always have the short end of the stick. What must be called for is not reform, but a true reallocation of land and wealth. In Biko's framing, political freedom without material redistribution is meaningless. There is no justice where the land remains stolen and the economy remains in settler hands. Voting rights cannot substitute for sovereignty. The Freedom Charter's ambiguity on the land question was deliberate. Its proclamation that 'the land shall be shared among those who work it' collapses the historical reality of conquest into a neutral discourse of labour and cooperation. Nowhere does it acknowledge the settler. Nowhere does it confront the theft. It fails to call for the return of land to the African majority. Instead of articulating a programme for decolonial redress, it adopts a conciliatory tone that prioritises harmony over justice. In effect, what is framed as a liberation mandate operates as a grammar of pacification, designed to absorb resistance rather than advance revolution. That ambiguity carried through to the 1996 Constitution. Patrick Bond, in Elite Transition, makes the point that the constitutional settlement was a product of a class compromise. It was designed to pacify international investors, preserve white capital and neutralise the revolutionary impulse. The negotiated settlement did not emerge from the will of the masses but from a triangulation between the African National Congress leadership, global capital and white economic power. The result was a Constitution that promises equality but enshrines ownership. As Bond argues, the Constitution operates as 'a myth-making meme,' built to deradicalise struggle by offering symbolic rights in place of structural change. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading This is why land reform remains stalled. Section 25, the so-called property clause, protects private ownership even when that ownership is the direct result of theft and conquest. It couches restitution in the language of reasonableness and affordability, deferring justice to bureaucratic paralysis. This legal framework reflects the ideological DNA of the Freedom Charter, a text that never sought to overthrow the economic system but to moralise it. Biko understood the danger of this kind of liberal substitution. Freedom without land and without independent means of livelihood is meaningless. For Biko, Black liberation was not about removing apartheid's legal codes. It was about removing the very conditions that made white power possible. 'It is not enough to remove the white man from power. We must remove the conditions that made his power possible.' That project remains unfulfilled. Black consciousness leader Steve Biko's philosophy and ideology has stood the test of time. Image: Independent Media Archives The contemporary consequences are blatant. The mining belt still delivers billions in profit to multinational corporations while leaking acid into rivers and lungs. Rural communities are poisoned and abandoned. Urban centres swell with unemployed Black youth, structurally excluded from ownership in a society that defines success through capital accumulation. The banks, insurance houses, farms and media corporations remain in the hands of a racial oligarchy. Even the new sectors such as renewable energy, climate funding and global NGOism have been captured by former struggle stalwarts and their descendants who now form a class of managerial elites enriching themselves through donor money, Foundations and PR projects while the majority go hungry. None of this can be explained without naming the ideological function of the Freedom Charter. It is not a neutral historical artefact. It is the founding myth of a liberal transition that demanded compromise from the dispossessed and reconciliation with the profiteers of genocide. It is the script from which the Constitution was adapted and it continues to function as the moral cover for structural betrayal. For the younger generation, landless, jobless and criminalised, being told to look to Kliptown is a form of political insult. The Charter never spoke to their reality. It is a document that offered peace to power and slogans to the oppressed. It evaded the core contradiction of settler colonialism. There is no coexistence until land is returned, power is redistributed and the entire economic foundation of white supremacy is dismantled. This is why Black Consciousness remains relevant. Steve Biko never asked the settler to share. He never asked for a seat at the table. He rejected liberalism, both white and black. He believed that Black people must define their own future, control their own institutions and return to the land that was stolen. Blacks must no longer be content to be on the receiving end but must be the architects of their own destiny. This simply cannot be reconciled with the logic of the Charter. The Charter imagines a common future built on a shared investment in the nation. Biko called for sovereignty. The Charter offered inclusion into colonial modernity. Biko called for its destruction. The Charter deferred revolution in favour of negotiation. Biko rejected negotiation with thieves. There is no middle ground between these two positions. The Freedom Charter was not sacred in 1955 and it is not sacred now. Its myth has been used to sedate political thought, justify class betrayal and deliver the masses into the hands of consultants, capital and false prophets. Ronnie Kasrils reinvoking it as a sacred text is emblematic of the liberalism that Biko warned about. That formations such as the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) celebrate the Freedom Charter in the current conjuncture signals the extent to which emancipatory politics in South Africa have been diluted and depoliticised. What was once a militant voice of class struggle has become entangled in the sentimental recitation of a document that failed to name the enemy. The echo chamber of Charterist nostalgia - amplified by a hybrid class of empty political commentators who mimic Kasrils and perform struggle rhetoric devoid of class analysis or historical accountability, reflects the ideological decay of a post-apartheid order collapsing under its own contradictions. In this postmodern liberal wasteland, recycled slogans masquerade as politics, and no pathway toward genuine liberation is offered. We rose against the system in 1976 and we must do it again. By any means necessary we must rise, expose, dismantle and overthrow the system that has kept us in a permanent prison in our own land. There will be no redemption without land. There will be no healing without the destruction of settler systems. There will be no justice where the economic base remains unchanged. And there will be no dignity for the African majority until the struggle is re-centred on material return. We were not dispossessed through metaphor. We will not be liberated through myth. The Charter must fall. The Constitution must be rewritten. The land must be returned. Until that happens, the real betrayal will not be those who critique the Freedom Charter, but those who continue to protect it. * Sipho Singiswa is a political analyst, filmmaker and Native rights activist. A 1976 student leader and former Robben Island prisoner, he has rejected the post-apartheid elite project and continues to organise around land and economic justice and the liberation of the African majority. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
Daily Maverick
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
History imposes a burden on us to speak out in defence of the Palestinians
President Nelson Mandela said in December 1997: 'We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.' These words are more than the rhetoric of solidarity, and are not merely a statement of fact. They are also a grim warning. He was speaking in the knowledge of the links between Zionism and apartheid. The links are still real. The 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter is an appropriate moment to refer to these links. The Congress of the People adopted the Freedom Charter on 26 June 1955. On reading the Bill of Rights in South Africa's Constitution, one will find the entire Freedom Charter has become part of South African law. It thus belongs to all South Africans equally. This was ensured by the manner in which it was drawn up – following a call to all South Africans to state their demands for what South Africa should be like. If the Freedom Charter defines a free South Africa, then we are not free – yet. There is still much work to do, and some of that involves what Mandela had in mind. South African Zionists never welcomed the end of apartheid. As the years have passed since Mandela's speech on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Zionist hostility has intensified against our South Africa striving to build a post-apartheid democratic state. Zionism has much to lose from our efforts. Much is made of the Balfour Declaration by Zionists. Lord Arthur Balfour himself was a racist and anti-Semite, and in 1906 he said of South Africa: 'We have to face the facts. Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.' The Freedom Charter was adopted in response to demands which the people of South Africa were asked to make, and which defined the South Africa they wanted to live in. What Balfour said was rejected by the words of the Freedom Charter: 'We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people; 'That our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality…' The apartheid government of South Africa had a different plan for our country, and one with which Zionists have never quarrelled. In his book Zionism During the Holocaust: the Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation (2022), Tony Greenstein describes how the Zionists accepted an apartheid future for South Africa when the National Party was elected by the white electorate. The compromise was that in return for an end to National Party anti-Semitism, Zionists – in a lying claim to speak for all Jews – would support apartheid. Usually credited with designing the details of apartheid South Africa, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd said: 'The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.' He was correct. In 2024 his opinion was confirmed by the International Court of Justice. Content with Verwoerd's comparison, Zionist Israel welcomed John Vorster, South Africa's prime minister, to Israel in 1976. He even laid a wreath at the Holocaust Memorial to the six million Jews whose deaths he had supported during World War 2 when he had been interned because of his active support for the Nazis. But the scene has changed. The spirit of the Freedom Charter now rides high in South African law, and Zionism must be confronted as our Constitution demands. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) have declared war on South Africa's anti-racist and democratic objectives. Equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein has even removed the South African government from the Sabbatical prayer. South Africa's Zionists are outraged by the proceedings before the International Court of Justice against Israel under what is known briefly as the Genocide Convention, and the ICJ's provisional conclusions. They refuse to recognise that South Africa's action is demanded by the Freedom Charter itself, which states: 'South Africa shall be a fully independent state which respects the rights and sovereignty of all nations.' South Africa's Constitution binds us to international law. History imposes a burden on us to speak out in defence of the Palestinians, whom the world has recognised to be the victims of Zionist apartheid. Zionist Israel has made no secret of its intentions, and they are free to be read by anyone. What would the world think of South Africa if we remained silent when the gates of hell were opened to unleash the logical conclusions of apartheid on Palestinians? In fact, the world is beginning to act. South Africa is a co-founder of the Hague Group, which was established to protect and uphold international law in the face of Israeli and American defiance of the United Nations, the ICJ and the International Criminal Court. Initially, the Hague Group included Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia and Senegal. To halt the genocide the group is convening an Emergency Ministerial Conference in Bogotá, Colombia, on 15 and 16 July 2025. Significantly, many more governments from Asia, Africa and Latin America have confirmed their participation. But there is more to the matter than South African solidarity with the Palestinians. The Zionist poison that it is anti-Semitic to criticise Israel in its form as a racist ethno-national state must also be confronted at home. This is a matter of South African self-interest if we are to form a country envisaged by the Freedom Charter, and the Constitution based on it. There is no space here to set out the history of Zionism, beyond noting that it was born out of anti-Semitic violence. Anti-Semitism exists with the ignorant bigotry of all forms of racism, but criticism of Zionism is not anti-Semitic. As free as we are under section 15 of our Constitution in 'conscience, religion, thought, belief and opinion', our freedom of expression under section 16 excludes 'propaganda for war, incitement of imminent violence, or advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm'. Zionism urges on us what is forbidden. Defeating Zionism in South Africa is therefore a task we have to discharge. Nelson Mandela's words are a warning – Zionism is an enemy from our past and attempting to haunt our present. This is not a call to ban the SAJBD or the SAZF or their supporters. That is no longer the South African way of doing right, and the enemy we have to defeat and whose harms are still with us must not be our teachers. Our task of defeating Zionism is made both easier and harder by its nature: it is easier because South Africa needs no violence against Zionism; it is harder because changing people's minds is not easy. We will win. Zionists have no hope. The political forces that supported apartheid are becoming extinct dragons of South Africa's past – where is the party of Verwoerd and Vorster today? Zionism is beginning to join them, and we will be a better country when the Palestinians are free. DM
Daily Maverick
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Seventy years on — understanding the Freedom Charter in changing times
Just as the Congress of the People — the way the Freedom Charter was created — was a process and not an event, the same is true of the charter itself. Its meaning was not finalised on the day of its adoption on 26 June 1955. The Freedom Charter does not have an obvious interpretation that stands in place from generation to generation. How we interpret the document is affected by where we are located, what our interests are in looking at the charter, what we hope for, and what resonates with the charter in terms of aspirations that people have for a better life. Obviously, the conditions — of any time — affect what can be done to provide basic needs and realise the aspirations of the charter. It's now 70 years since the Freedom Charter was adopted at the Congress of the People on 26 June 1955. There are still many things to learn about the charter, some of which entail what I would suggest ought to be a revision of how we understand the document. Just as we used to say that the Congress of the People — the way the Freedom Charter was created — was a process and not an event, the same is true of the charter itself. Its meaning was not finalised on the day of its adoption on 26 June 1955. Its meanings (in the plural) must be modified in different conditions as we grow and learn more and our democratic consciousness may develop. The first thing to notice is that the charter emerged from a process of extensive consultation, not simply from the president of the ANC saying that there was extensive consultation, as Cyril Ramaphosa does in relation to the National Dialogue. The Congress of the People process is now well documented, and the statements of participants testify to it entailing arduous consultations with people from all walks of life in order to access views from a range of classes and strata. (See Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Cronin, 50 Years of the Freedom Charter, 2006 and Ismail Vadi, The Congress of the People and Freedom Charter: A People's History, 2015.) The Freedom Charter was adopted as a consensual document, a consensus emerging from a long process of demands being heard and recorded and distilled into the short document that is accessible, and has remained part of many people's political development and part of their ways of evaluating the present and progress towards realising freedoms today. An example of changing meanings is with one of the key clauses of the Freedom Charter which reads that 'The People Shall Govern!', and until recently that was interpreted to mean that people would have the right to elect representatives to Parliament. It does remain the understanding of many. That is why in the book that I wrote with Jeremy Cronin, one has Dorothy Nyembe, who served 18 years in prison, saying about the Freedom Charter that the people were going to vote for Chief Albert Luthuli (then ANC president), Dr Monty Naicker (then president of the Natal Indian Congress and Dr Yusuf Dadoo (then president of the Transvaal Indian Congress) to lead them into Parliament. So the notion of 'The People Shall Govern!' entailed the realisation of its meaning through voting for Parliament, what is known as representative democracy. About 30 years later in the People's Power period of the UDF in a number of parts of the country, one saw people taking control of their own destiny at a local level, kicking out the police and Bantu Administration officials of the apartheid regime. They then created their own street committees, block committees and other projects of self-government at a local level with the meaning being similar to 'The People Shall Govern!', but at a local level and with the masses taking direct control. One of the people who was interviewed in this period, Weza Made from Uitenhage, said specifically that what they were doing with the People's Power period was to implement the first clause of the Freedom Charter, 'The People Shall Govern!' This illustrates what it means to give meaning to something like the Freedom Charter. The meaning of words must be constantly rethought in the light of new experiences. In striving for freedom, these become part of our understanding. In fact, one must give a new meaning in the context of the present where one has an election-centred notion of freedom. There may be diverse notions of what it means to exercise political freedom, and it need not mean that ideas of popular power ought to be suppressed or, alternatively, that representative democracy must give way to popular, direct democracy. We should see freedom as involving a combination of popular power and popular inputs into all organs of the government. Right now, there are limited spaces for popular inputs into legislation and other processes of government, and there is zero official space for popular, direct democracy. That is the official space, but there are unofficial spaces for the popular, notably inhabited by the shack dwellers' movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. There may be others who without publicity can be characterised as popular democratic sites. Representative and popular democracy are not antagonistic to one another if the meaning of representative democracy is to give voice to the voters who are not present in Parliament and other elected bodies, but have delegated the representative to carry out their interests, to re-present them in the organs of Parliament, as if they were there. The Freedom Charter and nation building In the Struggle against apartheid, much of the discussion and debate among comrades who were fighting for a free South Africa related to what was called the 'national question', or sometimes 'nation building' or what comprised a new nation. In thinking more about the Freedom Charter, I've come to believe that one of its key products was a contribution towards nation building. In the course of this short document, you have a number of propositions. These headings of parts of the Freedom Charter themselves comprise a vision of the new South Africa, that the charter and the people who made it believed should comprise what a new nation should be. What is useful for us is that these are not scientific categories in the main, but moral qualities that ought to inform us. The headings under which these political and moral qualities emerge are: The People Shall Govern! All National Groups Shall Have Equal Rights! The People Shall Share in The Country's Wealth! The Land Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It! All Shall Be Equal Before the Law! All Shall Enjoy Equal Human Rights! There Shall Be Work and Security! The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened!' There Shall Be Housing Security and Comfort! Charterists and the role of the Freedom Charter in the Congress movement Those who supported the ANC-led liberation movement were often referred to as Charterists. That was one of the key bases for delineating who belonged in the Congress movement, who supported the leadership of the ANC and the UDF. In working on these lines of demarcation, the main thing was to convince the public that the Congress movement, as opposed to other movements, best represented their interests. The Freedom Charter would be alluded to as one of the bases on which that claim was made. But there was not room at that time for careful scrutiny of all the clauses of the charter and to give it meanings that had some authority within the organisations. I think this is true of a lot of ideas that were used to rally people and get people to rally behind a document like the Freedom Charter. This is not the same as giving it a definitive meaning. In some ways, that is a strength in that hopefully people start to debate the meanings of documents of the liberation movement in a time of peace. Unfortunately, that has not happened from what I can see. The Freedom Charter as a nation-building document The Freedom Charter emerged as a national project of the ANC and its allies. In that sense, it was a popular process of consultation to hear people's views as evidenced in the documentation of the Congress of the People campaign. On the one hand, it was a popular process, but on the other, it was part of national liberation, a project for building a new nation, a new nation with a series of values that it sought assistance in getting people to make their own preferences, expressing what worried them in South Africa at the time and what they saw as remedying the problems that they faced. The Freedom Charter is a nation-building document and does not go into details like a constitution, but it sought to elicit from people ideas as to what their future should be. It's a document that tries to join people and to find ways of binding people. That is why throughout the document one finds stirring allusions to the unity of the people and ways of joining people to one another. DM
Eyewitness News
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Eyewitness News
Joburg Mayor Morero promises to return dilapidated Walter Sisulu Square to its former glory
JOHANNESBURG - Johannesburg Mayor Dada Morero has promised to return the dilapidated Walter Sisulu Square to its former state by June next year. Located in Kliptown, Soweto, the square is both a national and a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is where the Congress of the People took place in 1955 and the Freedom Charter was adopted. ALSO READ: • Some Kliptown residents say govt has fallen short of Freedom Charter ideals • Dilapidated state of Walter Sisulu Square symbolic of the deteriorating state of Kliptown, says resident The square was damaged during the July 2021 unrest and now lies in a run-down state.
Eyewitness News
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Eyewitness News
Freedom Charter 70 years on: Land reform, wealth distribution still lagging, says ANC
JOHANNESBURG – The African National Congress (ANC) believes the democratic government has achieved the majority of ideals in the Freedom Charter, except for land reform and economic transformation. The African National Congress (ANC) has governed the country since the turn of democracy in 1994. On Thursday, the party is holding a commemorative event at the Walter Sisulu Square in Kliptown, Soweto, where the Freedom Charter was adopted during the Congress of the People 70 years ago. ALSO READ: * Some Kliptown residents say govt has fallen short of Freedom Charter ideals * Heritage sites associated with Freedom Charter neglected The Freedom Charter was drawn up as a blueprint for what a democratic South Africa should look like. A non-racial state, where everyone's vote counts and citizens share in the country's wealth. The ANC's deputy secretary general, Nomvula Mokonyane, says it has been partly achieved. 'We have touched every clause of the Freedom Charter, boldly we can say South Africans are the beneficiaries of all the clauses, albeit not everything has been touched. The most stubborn is the clause that talks about the economy and the sharing of the wealth.' Mokonyane says the country's land restitution programme has not been successful, which is why the Expropriation Act was recently signed into law.
