Читать книгу Shadow of Liberation - Vishnu Padayachee - Страница 10

CHAPTER

2

African Claims, the Freedom Charter and Social Democracy, 1943–1960

THE ORIGIN OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC IDEAS IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST FASCISM IN THE 1940S

The period between 1939 and 1945 was a significant one for the development of inclusive social policies that created the possibility of a social democratic option for a post-war, post-segregation South Africa. The war against fascism led to many white workers enlisting in the army. This meant that the United Party government under Jan Smuts was forced to depend on black economic and political support for the Allied war effort, of which South Africa was a part. The need to maintain ‘industrial peace’ in Smuts’ phrase (Hansard, vol. 43, 1942, col. 5) and fearing Japanese invasion after the collapse of Singapore in February 1942, the United Party established a series of commissions on a post-war ‘people’s charter’. This included examination of the social needs of urban Africans, who were the bedrock of industrial growth and thus the war effort. These social policy reviews in health, education and welfare represented the most extensive examination of the effects of poverty and lack of social service provision in South African history, only surpassed by the democratic government of Nelson Mandela in 1994. The reviews identified the need for direct government intervention to overcome the failure of the policy of segregation to stem the tide of black urbanisation in the 1940s, and to ameliorate the health and welfare conditions of Africans in the urban areas. They also showed that the system of capitalism neglected to remunerate African workers at a level adequate to sustain their livelihood in urban areas.

A number of detailed social development proposals consistent with a broadly social democratic impetus emerged between 1940 and 1944. They recommended a national health service under state control; the extension of state housing and welfare provision for Africans; the eradication of the pass laws, which forcibly controlled the movement of Africans; the extension of social security into a national system incorporating urban Africans; central government control of African education; and specific measures around the extension of milk provision and feeding schemes for Africans. The political circumstances of the war against fascism induced this search on the part of the Smuts government for more inclusive social policies that could relieve the poverty of urban Africans, and was led by liberal reformers in the government. The unstated ‘diswelfares’ caused by segregation and capitalism were thus not allowed to remain undealt with, but were seen by these government commissions as the responsibility of the state.

The reformist proposals emerging in South Africa were broadly comparable to the more inclusive social policy proposals in the UK in the 1940s, based on state protected social rights of citizenship that were spearheaded by the Beveridge Report. These proposals eventually led to the establishment of the welfare state following a landslide Labour Party victory in 1945. In the colonies, the strategic consequences of the ‘self-determination’ provisions of the 1941 anti-fascist Atlantic Charter were also taken up by anti-colonial radicals (United Nations 2018). For example, as early as 1942, the African-independence political activist George Padmore identified the strategic importance of the call by the Atlantic Charter to make global democratisation and extension of welfare part of the struggle against colonialism (Padmore and Cunard 1942). This position was consolidated at the 5th Pan Africanist Congress in Manchester in 1945, where the resolution of the West Indies delegation was adopted. It called for the ‘immediate introduction of all forms of modern social legislation in existence in metropolitan areas, e.g., old age pensions, family allowances, national health and unemployment insurances …’ (Padmore 1963: 60).

The anti-fascist ‘war years’ thus created a global climate for the investigation of radical social reform ideas of a social democratic character. These ideas were seized upon by intellectuals in the black opposition movements in South Africa, such as AB Xuma, a public health doctor and president general of the ANC between 1940 and 1949. The convergence on the need for fundamental social reforms in South Africa between the Xuma-led ANC and the segregationist, liberal, white ruling United Party of Smuts was made possible by the acceptance of the Atlantic Charter’s provision for post-war democratisation and the extension of social security to all nations under nazi and fascist occupation. The United Party supported this objective globally and joined the war on the Allied side in 1940, while the ANC produced a citizenship charter in 1943, African Claims, which related the Atlantic Charter to the lack of democracy and social rights for blacks in South Africa. Both groups, for very different strategic reasons, hoped the implementation of the Atlantic Charter would be beneficial for post-war South Africa.

AFRICAN CLAIMS IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1943

The impact of the international rights-based Atlantic Charter of 1941, which established the political foundations for a post-war settlement, had a major influence on South African opposition political movements. In particular, its call to ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; … and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’, as well as its advocacy of inclusive social policy aimed at ‘securing, for all, improved labour standards, economic advancement and social security’ (Borgwardt 2002: 46), was applied to South Africa in the ANC’s 1943 document, African Claims in South Africa. Leaders of the ANC, such as Xuma and ZK Matthews, were already exposed to a social rights discourse through their educational activities at liberal universities and intellectual engagements with liberals and civil rights activists in the US and Britain in the 1930s. For example, following the completion of his medical studies, Xuma gave a speech entitled ‘Bridging the Gap between White and Black’, which compared the position of blacks and whites in South Africa against an American ideal, and which gave ‘hope and citizenship rights to all alike’ (in Walshe 1970: 60). They were thus acutely interested in the implications for blacks in South Africa of the advocacy of global democratisation and social citizenship by Allied leaders, the US in particular, in opposition to fascism and nazism.

The African Claims policy framework for a social democratic future was firmly rooted in the intellectual traditions of the ANC. This was reflected in the Atlantic Charter Committee of 1943, assembled by Xuma to prepare the provisions of the African Claims document. The committee included leading figures of the African intelligentsia, such as the chairperson, ZK Matthews (executive member of the ANC); James Calata (secretary general of the ANC); Moses Kotane (general secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa [CPSA]¹ and member of the ANC); Govan Mbeki (trade secretary of the Federation of Organised Bodies in Transkei); Edwin Mofutsanyana (member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC and member of the CPSA); Gana Makabeni, trade unionist and president of the Council of Non-European Trade Unions); Pixley ka Isaka Seme (attorney and member of the ANC National Executive Committee); RV Selope Thema (editor of Bantu World, member of the Native Representative Council and speaker of the ANC); and AB Xuma (president general of the ANC). The thinking of the Atlantic Charter Committee was distilled in African Claims in South Africa, the most significant statement by the ANC in the war years on the new post-war ‘good society’, based on black enfranchisement and social rights of citizenship. Its strategic political intervention was to apply political, civil and social rights, which were advocated in the Atlantic Charter and endorsed by the ruling United Party, to the disenfranchised black people in South Africa.

The section on a Bill of Rights in African Claims echoed the American Declaration of Independence. It set out the most unequivocal statement of African expectations for full, unqualified rights to citizenship: ‘We, the African people in the Union of South Africa, urgently demand the granting of full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa’ (ANC 1943: 217). The Bill of Rights then stipulated in greater detail the content of such citizenship, its specificity worth citing in some detail:

•civil rights: ‘To equal justice in courts of law, including nominations to juries and appointment as judges, magistrates and other court officials’; ‘Freedom of movement, and the repeal of the pass laws’. ‘The right to own, buy, hire or lease and occupy land and all other forms of … property.’

•political rights, based on: ‘Abolition of political discrimination based on race … and the extension to all adults, regardless of race, of the right to vote and be elected to parliament, provincial councils and other representative institutions’; ‘The right to be appointed to and hold office in the civil service and in all branches of public employment.’

•social rights, based on: ‘The establishment of free medical and health services for all sections of the population’; ‘The right of every child to free and compulsory education and of admission to technical schools, universities and other institutions of higher education’; ‘Equality of treatment with any other section of the population in the State social services, and the inclusion on an equal basis with Europeans in any scheme of social security’; ‘That the African worker … be insured against sickness unemployment, accidents, old age and for all other physical disabilities arising from the nature of their work; the contributions to such insurance should be borne entirely by the government and the employers’; ‘The extension of all industrial welfare legislation to Africans engaged in Agriculture, Domestic Service and in Public institutions or bodies’ (ANC 1943: 217–221).

The ANC’s 1943 Bill of Rights started from civil rights. These, in turn, led directly to political rights and finally to recognition of social rights. These claims prefigured TH Marshall’s famous 1950 essay on citizenship and social class and the political evolution of civil, political and social rights through three consecutive stages (Marshall 1950). It represented the most significant statement on non-racial, universal rights of citizenship in the period of the 1940s, and, in its universality and focus on state-provided ‘public goods’, unambiguously represented the origins of inclusive social democratic thinking and a concomitant social democratic development path for post-segregation South African society.

However, for the ANC, led by Xuma, the absence of political enfranchisement of blacks revealed the limits of liberalisation and the possibilities for a broadly social democratic reform agenda suggested in the early war years. The authors of African Claims were not naive in their belief that the radical claims made would be acceded to. In the document’s preface, Xuma states: ‘As African leaders we are not so foolish as to believe that because we have made these declarations that our government will grant us our claims for the mere asking. We realise that for the African this is only a beginning of a long struggle entailing great sacrifices of them, means and even life itself. To the African people the declaration is a challenge to organise and unite themselves under the mass liberation movement, the African National Congress’ (ANC 1943: 210).

After repeated failed attempts to secure a meeting with Smuts to discuss the implications of the Atlantic Charter, Xuma sent him a copy of African Claims and its Bill of Rights (Gish 2000). After reading the document, Smuts sent a reply to Xuma through his private secretary, Henry Cooper, in September 1944, rejecting African Claims as a ‘propagandistic document intended to propagate the views of your Congress … [The prime minister] … does not agree with your effort to stretch its meaning so as to make it apply to all sorts of African problems and conditions. That is an academic affair which does not call for any intervention on his part …’ (in Gish 2000: 129). The failure to implement inclusive social policies demonstrated the limits of social citizenship based on social democratic ideas in the absence of civil and political rights.

By 1945, the possibility of developing and implementing progressive social policies of a social democratic character was eclipsed by the right-wing drift of the white electorate, who voted the United Party back into power on a 110-seat majority in July 1943. The ANC, meanwhile, underwent a radicalisation following the confluence of a new militant Africanist nationalism under the stewardship of Anton Lembede and AP Mda, along with the increasing influence of trade unionism, the rise of civil disobedient squatter movements and boycotts of bus services.

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE FREEDOM CHARTER

The account of how the Freedom Charter came to be conceived, how a ‘thoroughly bourgeois activist’ (Bernstein 1999: 145), ZK Matthews, came to propose this ‘radical’ charter in Stanger, how the document came to be assembled from scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes are all well known. In his account of it, Rusty Bernstein (1999), one of its drafters, along with Ben Turok and many others, makes two important points. The first relates to the way in which the charter had to reconcile what appeared to be quite irreconciable demands, reflecting the different strands within the ANC Alliance at the time. Thus, on economic policy, there were, among the scraps of paper in the tin trunk where they had been collected, demands for the nationalisation of mines and banks, alongside demands to end barriers to black private ownership and shareholding. Phraseology had to be employed creatively in an attempt to keep all sides happy, not always with success. Claims were made that the Communist Party influence ensured that the document had a socialist flavour and substance.

The reflections of Turok, a leading South African Communist Party (SACP) activist, on a 1953 clandestine meeting held at the factory of Julius First (a senior Party member) seems to support a non-interventionist Party influence in the strategic discussions on the Freedom Charter. The meeting was convened by Yusuf Dadoo, chairperson of the Central Committee of the SACP, with a group of seasoned communist activists, including Fred Carneson, Joe Slovo and Ruth First.

We met in the factory, in the shed. And there were fires – coal burners – around the table, because it was freezing cold. And Yusuf opened up with a sort of international perspective. And then Michael Harmel led and so on. Now, we [the SACP] had a document called the ‘Minimum Programme’.² When I was asked to speak, I thought, what am I going to say? I think I was told that, well, the Party programme, the Minimum Programme, should be somehow a basis for the Freedom Charter. Now it’s not an instruction and I don’t remember how that happened. I’m not sure that I consciously said to myself or anybody else that the Freedom Charter must reflect the Minimum Programme of the Party. But I think that in my mind there was that, you see. So when I came up to the meeting, the meeting the day before, when I was presented with this reformist economic clause [of the Freedom Charter], I looked at it and I thought, no no no. This is not what I’m about. Now, whether that was in my head … or whether it was reflecting all the stuff I’d learnt in Europe, in England, in the Labour Party and all that, I can’t recall. And who knows how one’s consciousness works … But there’s no doubt that the independent policy-making of the Party influenced all of us. How much, and to what degree, what the mechanisms were, I don’t think I’m able to say. But it was there (Turok interview, 31 May 2014).

Bernstein (1999: 159) points out that ‘nationalisation is not necessarily a gateway to socialism’, making the example of the then nationalised railways and electricty supply, embedded within a system of white supremacy and gross economic injustice.

Bernstein’s second point, either missed or little appreciated by most commentators, including ourselves until now, is that, contrary to general belief among Congress activists, ‘debates over economic policy and the relative merits of capitalism and socialism were everyday stuff … The debate over the economic clauses of the Charter was not much more than an additional element in an ongoing debate’ (Bernstein 1999: 160).

In a revealing response to Niël Barnard (the apartheid-era head of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service) and others who visited Mandela in prison, when asked about the nationalisation policy of the ANC, Mandela’s reply was that: ‘Nationalisation might occur for certain “monopoly” industries but that he had always considered [the Freedom Charter] a blueprint for African-style capitalism’ (Harvey 2001: 143). Of course, one has to remember his audience on this occasion. However, while some may stress the ‘capitalism’, we would point to the ‘African’ style; surely he had in mind a more collective, socialised form of economic organisation?

In Season of Hope, Alan Hirsch (2005) has pointed to a line in a 1956 article by Mandela, apparently supportive of the development of a black bourgeois class, in which he proposes that the ANC has always been a party of private enterprise, black business development and a market-oriented party. Rather than shifting to the right as some have suggested, the ANC was simply reverting to its pro-market, pro-private enterprise roots. We do not accept this argument. In our interpretation, Mandela’s 1956 article, published in the journal Liberation and reproduced by Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter (1977), explicitly legitimates nationalisation of the wealth of the country, consistent with the provisions of the Freedom Charter. His arguments for a multi-class alliance led by working people to establish democratic governance in the interests of the whole society is perfectly consistent with a social democratic approach. Indeed, the stress on democracy is a characteristic feature of such an approach. Here are the relevant sections quoted in full:

The workers are the principal force upon which the democratic movement should rely, but to repel the savage onslaughts of the Nationalist Government and to develop the fight for democratic rights it is necessary that the other classes and groupings be joined … The cruel and inhuman manner with which they are treated, their dreadful poverty and economic misery, make them potential allies of the democratic movement. The Non-European traders and businessmen are also potential allies, for in hardly any other country in the world has the ruling class made conditions so extremely difficult for the rise of a Non-European middle class as in South Africa. The law of the country prohibits Non-Europeans from owning or possessing minerals. Their right to own and occupy land is very much restricted and circumscribed and it is virtually impossible for them to own factories and mills. Therefore, they are vitally interested in the liberation of the Non-European people for it is only by destroying white supremacy and through the emancipation of the Non-Europeans that they can prosper and develop as a class. To each of these classes and groups the struggle for democratic rights offers definite advantages. To every one of them the realisation of the demands embodied in the Charter would open a new career and vast opportunities for development and prosperity. These are the social forces whose alliance and unity will enable the democratic movement to vanquish the forces of reaction and win the democratic changes envisaged in the Charter (Mandela 1956: 7–8).

Turok responds to Hirsch by insisting that, while the ANC held some contradictory positions on this issue, it is wrong to claim that the ANC wanted ‘free rein’ for a bourgeois struggle. We will return to this point in chapter 4.

MASS-BASED POLITICAL MOBILISATION, NON-RACIALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE FREEDOM CHARTER IN THE 1950S

This exclusionary Africanist position was to change with the 1952 Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws and the development of a non-racial political tradition under the newly emerging political leadership of Oliver Tambo and Mandela.

The mass politics of defiance in the 1950s increasingly brought into focus the dialectic of race and class – that is, the struggle to overcome national oppression was not reducible to a struggle against apartheid racism but had to confront the class relationships that reproduced inequality and underpinned racism. By implication, it had to confront the nature of the post-apartheid state and the post-apartheid society offered as an alternative to capitalism, as well as the repressive social exclusion associated with draconian apartheid legislation.

The ANC’s campaigning around rights of political citizenship became a primary focus of its political activities in the 1950s, with the specific concerns of social policy gradually subsumed under this primary political objective.

Andrew Mlangeni, last surviving member of the Robben Island group of Rivonia Trialists and a member of the CPSA and the ANC in the 1950s, was based in Dube, Soweto. His reflection on the ANC’s preoccupation with national liberation objectives to the virtual exclusion of deliberations on economic policy is telling:

You know in the 1950s, especially after the Defiance Campaign, the ANC was emphasising freedom, freedom for the people of South Africa, but in particular, the black people. There wasn’t so much talk about the economic position of the country, what the policy of the ANC was on the economy of the country. What was being emphasised was largely freedom, that we must be free to elect a government of our own like the white people at the time. So that we can live as the white people of South Africa lived at the time. In the branches of the African National Congress not much was being discussed about the economy of the country. Things only changed after the Freedom Charter was adopted (Mlangeni interview, 6 October 2015).

In 1952, Albert Luthuli became the president general, and he was to lead the ANC until his death in 1967. Luthuli commented in 1952 on the shift to militant opposition around citizenship demands as follows:

In so far as gaining citizenship rights and opportunities for the unfettered development of the African people, who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of my many years of moderation? Has there been any reciprocal tolerance or moderation from the Government, be it Nationalist or United Party? No! On the contrary, the past thirty years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all: no adequate land for our occupation, our only asset, cattle, dwindling, no security of homes, no decent and remunerative employment, more restriction to freedom of movement through passes, curfew regulations, influx control measures; in short we have witnessed in these years an intensification of our subjection to ensure and protect white supremacy.

It is with this background and with a full sense of responsibility that, under the auspices of the African National Congress (Natal), I have joined my people in the new spirit that moves them today, the spirit that revolts openly and boldly against injustice and expresses itself in a determined and non-violent manner (in Pillay 1993: 47).

What accounts for this displacement in the ANC from a concerted attempt to develop economic and social policies under Xuma in the 1940s, leading to the social democratic formulations of African Claims, to the relative policy barrenness of the 1950s, leading up to the Freedom Charter of 1955? A telling reason could be the combination of increased repression under the apartheid regime and weariness with constitutionally bound protests, with a more militant political leadership emerging in the ANC. Turok explained it as follows:

Now you see, a leadership is sensitive to the mood of the people. My guess … is that the 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 intellectual and later member of the Liberal Party and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), Jordan K Ngubane, on the communist influences on the ANC as reflected in the Freedom Charter, Luthuli distinguished the Freedom Charter from Soviet-style communism as follows:

Mr. Ngubane poses as an expert on the Communistic doctrines of Marx, Lenin and Engels and finds the Freedom Charter a Congress implementation of these doctrines. I do not claim to be such an expert, but I deny categorically Mr. Ngubane’s charges and I dare him to prove them. The most that could be said about the Freedom Charter is that it breathes in some of its clauses a socialistic and welfare state outlook, and certainly not a Moscow communistic outlook. Mr. Ngubane is concerned that the Charter calls for the nationalisation of certain branches of commerce and industry – in actual fact the number of such industries and commercial undertakings so mentioned is very limited; the Charter in this regard reads: ‘The national wealth of our country, the heritage of all 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; all other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the well-being of the people; all people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions.’ ‘The Land shall be shared among those who work it.’ Mr. Ngubane would like the world to believe that this is a document preaching the Moscow communistic creed. In modern society, even amongst the so-called capitalistic countries, nationalisation of certain industries and commercial undertakings has become an accepted and established fact (Luthuli 1956: n.p.).

Even though the comments of Mandela and Luthuli suggest that there was contestation within the ANC over the redistributive emphasis of the Freedom Charter, it was ratified at the Annual Conference of 1955. Its strong advocacy of social rights and state intervention in securing such rights made it compatible with the development of a Keynesian, social democratic welfare state, based on the social rights of citizenship. This represented an unequivocal continuity with the social democratic agenda established in the 1940s by the ANC. Far from being a ‘minimum programme’, the Freedom Charter suggested such a far-reaching transformation of South Africa that it would take a social revolution to achieve the goals of the ‘good society’ implied in the realisation of its demands. Seen from the lens of a democratic South Africa, the realisation of these demands implies a radical transformation in the organisation of political and economic power in the country.

The National Party under Hendrik Verwoerd viewed the Freedom Charter as a direct challenge to its state authority, and the charter was met with a hostile response. The National Party arrested the leadership of all the major political groups that had been involved in the Freedom Charter campaign, foremost of which was the ANC. Over a period of four years, during the Treason Trial, it attempted to prove that the citizenship demands of the Freedom Charter could be achieved only by a violent overthrow of the ruling government. The attempt to do so failed, and the case was dropped in March 1961 when the court ruled there was no case to answer.

The ANC was committed to civil disobedience campaigning, which, it hoped, would lead to the ruling party agreeing to a national convention. Such a national convention would allow for meaningful negotiations on a future constitutional order, based on the universal extension of the franchise. The National Party regime rejected the proposal for a national convention and resorted to increased violent repression of political protest, culminating in the indiscriminate shooting of unarmed anti-pass law protesters in Sharpeville on 21 March 1960. A state of emergency was declared nine days later, effectively outlawing all opposition political activity. The ANC and the PAC were banned following the promulgation of the Unlawful Organisations Act No. 34 of 1960.

The ANC’s response to the banning was contained in a statement by an Emergency Committee of the ANC on 1 April 1960. Recording that the ANC had historically attempted a non-violent, peaceful solution to resolving South Africa’s political problems, the statement indicated that such a solution was not possible under the current government of Verwoerd: ‘The first essential towards resolving the crisis is that the Verwoerd administration must make way for one less completely unacceptable to the people, of all races, for a Government which sets out to take the path, rejected by Verwoerd, of conciliation, concessions and negotiation’ (in Karis and Carter 1987: 573).

It reiterated political citizenship as its primary demand: ‘We cannot and never shall compromise on our fundamental demands, as set forth in the Freedom Charter, for the full and unqualified rights of all our people as equal citizens of our country. We do not ask for more than that; but we shall never be satisfied with anything less’ (in Karis and Carter 1987: 573).

Finally, the statement listed a set of proposals calling for the end of the state of emergency and the release of political prisoners, scrapping the system of pass laws, and doing away with laws curbing civil and political rights, concluding with the demand for a ‘new National Convention representing all people on a fully democratic basis, [which] must be called to lay the foundations of a new union, a non-racial democracy, belonging to all South Africans, and in line with the United Nations Charter and the views of all enlightened people everywhere in the world’ (in Karis and Carter 1987: 573).

The banning of the ANC in 1960 put an end to the possibility of dialogue between the opposition movement and the government on a democratic constitutional order, based on a universal franchise. The banned ANC was left with no alternative but to rely on mass mobilisation and underground forms of struggle as a means of overthrowing the apartheid regime, including the use of armed struggle.

By 1962, Luthuli was more categorical about the form of interventions that the state should support to realise the post-apartheid good society. In an article entitled ‘If I were Prime Minister’, published in the United States in Ebony magazine in February 1962, he offered economic and social policy proposals that unambiguously reflected his intention to establish a social democratic welfare state in South Africa if he was made prime minister:

The solution to the South African problem will call for radical reforms, some of them of a really revolutionary nature. The basic reform will be in the form of the government. At present, there is a government by whites only. This should be replaced by a government which is truly a government of all the people, for the people, and by the people. This can only be so in a state where all adults – regardless of race, colour or belief – are voters. Nothing but such a democratic form of government, based on the parliamentary system, will satisfy (Luthuli 1962: 21).

Indicating his own preference for a state based on social democracy, Luthuli argued that to address the ‘man-made inequality’ of apartheid ‘will demand what will appear to whites in South Africa to be revolutionary changes. Some form of a system such as is found in Great Britain and Sweden might meet the case’ (Luthuli 1962: 22).

Luthuli then expressed the mechanisms that the state would employ to achieve its social democratic policy goals of free education, affordable municipal housing and state-provided employment for ‘the bulk of people’, who would also enjoy unqualified rights to unionisation:

It is inevitable that nationalization and control – even on a larger scale than now – would be carried out by the government of the day after freedom, if justice is to be done to all, and the state enabled to carry out effectively its uplift work … State control will be extended to cover the nationalization of some sectors of what at present is private enterprise. It will embrace specifically monopoly industries, the mines and banks, but excluding such institutions as building societies (Luthuli 1962: 23).

Luthuli then advocated that the new government should have as its objective the creation of a ‘democratic social welfare state’: ‘I realize that a state such as I visualize – a democratic social welfare state – cannot be born in one day. But it will be the paramount task of the government to bring it about and advance it without crippling industry, commerce, farming and education’ (1962: 26, emphasis added).

Most tellingly the article reveals that Luthuli had given some thought to the actual policies that the state would employ in order to achieve its goals that were consistent with social democracy. These included government regulation and nationalisation of the private sector; redistributive rates of taxation; and protection of workers’ right to strike, concomitant with the entitlements associated with ‘social compacting’-type accords between labour, the state and enterprise as found in Scandinavian social democracies and the post-war British Labour Party under Clement Attlee, which ushered in the welfare state:

•Private enterprises, commerce and industry would be under government control as now, and probably stricter. Supertax on all high incomes should be levied on a higher percentage than now to meet the needs of uplifting the oppressed of former days.

•State control should be extended to cover the nationalisation of some sectors of what at present is private enterprise.

•Human rights as declared by the United Nations would be entrenched in the State Constitution.

•All workers would enjoy unqualified trade union rights with a charter laying down minimum wages and conditions. There would be no discrimination on grounds of colour or race. Merit would be the qualifying factor.

•The present framework of industrial legislation in so far as it applies to Whites would form the basis of industrial legislation. Workers would have the right to strike, for even if strikes might be costly and wasteful, it gives the individual a greater security if he knows he has the right, and it makes him feel a partner in the undertaking (Luthuli 1962: 23, emphasis added).

The discourse within the ANC between 1940 and 1962 as reflected in its key policy documents and the thinking of its presidents on a future state that could overcome the legacies of segregation and apartheid were premised on a state form that was democratic and would intervene in the economy to secure redistributive social policies in health, education and welfare. The substantive form of such a state was a social democratic welfare state. This is reflected in the policy formulations of the 1955 Freedom Charter, which demonstrated a reconnection with the inclusive discourse of the 1943 African Claims, and unequivocally in social policy with a social democratic idea of the post-apartheid ‘good society’.

The evidence from ANC policy literature and the reflections of key ANC thinkers and leaders such as Xuma and Luthuli (neither of whom were members of the CPSA) reveal that the ANC had an unmistakably social democratic view of the post-segregation and post-apartheid ‘good society’. Veterans such as Turok, Ahmed Kathrada and Mlangeni, whom we interviewed, confirm this picture of an ANC that was strongly committed to a society and an economy where the interests of the poor, marginalised, oppressed and exploited were to be the main focus of its work in any future democratic government, where it would rest with the state to drive this process through redistributive economic and social policies. Whether they articulated this as social democracy or socialism or something else matters less than the essential substance of the thinking and ideas.

The debate on ANC economic and social policies for a post-apartheid society, such as they were before 1994, were to evolve in three distinctive locales: Robben Island, the exile community and, in the latter part of the 1980s and 1990s, within South Africa. The following chapter reveals some telling observations from Mlangeni on the narrowing interpretations of the ‘nationalisation’ clause of the Freedom Charter as discussed among the imprisoned ANC comrades. It suggests that the more radical social democratic impetus, advocated by Luthuli up until and shortly following the banning of the ANC in 1961, would not be developed much further. The primary imperative of national liberation, based on a multi-class alliance of the oppressed, dominated the discourse of the ANC and eclipsed the clearly articulated policy proposals developed by Xuma and Luthuli.