Introduction

This is a study of the campaign for the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter which was initiated by the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), the South African Coloured People's Organisation (SACPO) and the South African Congress of Democrats (SACOD) in 1953 and completed by early 1956:

In the essence, I argue that this was a highly significant campaign which not only transformed the four sponsoring organisations, but the entire nature of resistance politics after 1955. Henceforth, every major act of resistance undertaken by the Congresses was coordinated by a principled alliance—the Congress Alliance—that was forged during COP campaign and anchored by a common political programme, the Freedom Charter.

The campaign for the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter was a distinctive and creative project, which brought together for the very first time the full weight of the liberation forces in South Africa. It served to consolidate a multiracial (non-racial) united front, an alliance of the principal extra-parliamentary, anti-apartheid forces in me 1950s—composed of the four Congresses, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), the Federation of South African Women (FSAW), and the clandestinely-reconstituted South African Communist Party (SACP). It further served to sustain political activity after the curbing of the Defiance Campaign, to develop and strengthen political organisation, to broaden the geographical and social bases of the liberation movement, to raise the level of political consciousness of the masses by offering a vision of an alternative social order and to isolate completely the Africanist tendency within the ANC.

The book examines the political developments that occurred prior to the actual decision of the Congresses to launch the COP campaign so as to locate this specific campaign within the ongoing tradition of resistance undertaken separately or jointly by the Congresses during the period 1932 to 1952. More specifically, it investigates the origins, objectives, course and nature of the Congress of the People campaign at a national level. It also provides a detailed study of the campaign in the Transvaal by analysing the roles of the four constituent organs of the Congress Alliance in the province, the roles of the trade union and women's movements, the different phases of the campaign, the patterns of political mobilisation in urban and rural areas, the methods of collecting and sorting demands, the processes of electing delegates to the historic Congress of the People and the manner in which the Freedom Charter was drafted and later adopted as Congress policy.

The book also studies the Freedom Charter popularisation campaign and the reasons for its failure. Finally, through an analysis of the Charter itself, the book demonstrates that its adoption reflected a significant ideological shift within the ANC, and that this reorientation was the product of a democratic process, which drew, in the direct participation, involvement and support of a large number of people and organisations in South Africa.

Despite the central importance of this campaign in the development of resistance politics in the 1950s, the published literature on the subject is inexplicably sketchy and limited. The major studies of resistance politics, such as Karis and Carter's From Protest to Challenge Volume 3, Lodge's Black Politics in South Africa since 1945, Roux's Time Longer Than Rope, Murray's South African Capitalism and Black Political Opposition, Luckhardt and Wall's Organise or Starve, Bunting's Moses Kotane : South African Revolutionary, Slovo's South Africa: No Middle Road, Benson's South Africa: the Struggle for a Birthright and Feit's African Opposition in South Africa, all make references to the Congress of the People and they provide a general description of the campaign at the national level, with specific emphasis on the work of the National Action Council. Writers sympathetic to the Congresses, like Slovo, make the claim that me COP was the "most representative assembly ever held in South Africa". Yet only one instructive study of the campaign has been published on the topic. This is surprising as extensive research has been done on the two other campaigns that fall within the time-scale of this project which were also organised by the ANC and its allies, viz., the Boycott of Bantu Education and the Anti-Western Areas Removal Campaign.

Apart from Cronin and Suttner's Thirty Years of the Freedom Charter no detailed analysis has yet been made of the campaign at the provincial, regional and local levels. No evaluation has been made of the depth of popular participation in the urban and rural areas, the degree of working class participation, the areas of weaknesses, the process of political mobilisation, the role of women, the nature of interaction between the leadership of organisations, rank and file activists and the people at grassroots level, and on the significance of campaign.

It is obvious that there is an academic vacuum on the subject. Yet, various conclusions have been arrived at about the nature and character of the campaign and the Freedom Charter. Lodge, for example, argues that the plan for the COP as outlined by the National Action Council was never implemented. He says that the second and third stages, that is, the setting up of local COP committees and the proper election of delegates to draft the Freedom Charter, were not implemented at all. Furthermore, because the drafting committee of the Freedom Charter was so small, he questions the democratic basis of the document.

In a similar vein, Motlhabi brings into question the "real origins of the Charter and the amount of participation in its drafting by the individual Congresses." He alleges that the Freedom Charter was "imposed upon the rest of the alliance by the communist-dominated Congress of Democrats" and seems to suggest that the ANC was not an independent, self-directing movement receiving its mandate and direction from grassroots experience.

It is this paucity of research on the subject that has prompted Fine to make the following comment on the campaign:

Both at the time of its formation and among today's heirs to the Congress tradition, the Charter has been presented as a pure expression of the 'voice of the people', allowing for the first time 'ordinary citizens' to speak for themselves.

The people, so the story goes, were called upon to pose their demands. The demands were gathered together by volunteers and the Freedom Charter was drafted on the basis of people's demands. It was presented to the Congress of the People, discussed and adopted by acclaim. Thirty years later it, continues to express 'the will of the people'. A good story but bad history.

These views are simply asserted or are inadequately substantiated and verified. They imply that the Freedom Charter was the product of an undemocratic practice and procedure, and that it did not emerge from the people as was initially conceived by Z.K. Matthews who said, "Unlike he ANC's African's Claims of 1943, a document formulated by intellectuals and leaders at the invitation of Xuma, the Freedom Charter was to reflect the demands or visions of a future society, filtered upwards from the mass of common men and women."

The second key problem with the published literature is its characterisation of the contents of the Freedom Charter. Karis and Carter see the Charter as "essentially a restatement of longstanding aims ... with one exception; if the ANC accepted the Charter, it would be for the first time in its history endorsing a nationalisation plank. The Charter envisaged a bourgeois democracy based on natural rights liberalism and formal equality of opportunity for individuals." Gail Gerhart makes a similar point. Suttner, by contrast, has characterised the Freedom Charter as an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist document. For him the adoption of the Freedom Charter "marked the start of a new era in the South African struggle.... From the moment of adoption of the Charter, all political solutions 'from above' were ruled out." Such generalised characterisations of the Freedom Charter do not help the historian to understand the ideological basis of the Congress Alliance and the content of its political programme. The key problem is that a great deal of comment on the campaign for the Congress of the People and on the Freedom Charter has been carried out under conditions of me struggle for national liberation. Historians and political analysts have failed to locate the Freedom Charter in its historical context.

Thirdly, there is an absolute failure of writers to highlight the 'Land Question' as embodied in the Freedom Charter. This also raises questions about the strength and influence of the ANC and the Congress Alliance in the rural areas, tile importance attached to the 'land question' and the degree of political participation of the peasantry in the national liberation movement. Bundy makes the point that the ANC in the 1950s had failed to respond to the peasant struggles until the Pondo revolt in 1959. There is a large measure of truth in his comments. However, this does not automatically mean that no political work at all was done in the rural areas. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that importance was attached to the mobilisation and organisation of the peasantry and agricultural workers during the Congress of the People Campaign. The following extract, for example, from an instruction leaflet to 'Freedom Volunteers' for the COP campaign calls upon Congress activists to pay attention to the countryside:

Let us not overlook the countryside. Volunteers from towns who have families and relatives in the countryside must go to the rural areas on the weekends, and hold discussions on the Charter. They must urge at every meeting in the towns, that all the people write or visit their friends in the rural areas and in the villages to tell them about the Freedom Charter, and to urge them to make demands without delay."

The book aims to fill this academic vacuum and address the issues raised above. Chapter 2 situates the campaign for the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter within the economic, social and political realities of the 1940s and 1950s. These decades witnessed the advent to power of the National Party, which introduced numerous repressive and racially discriminatory laws aimed at tightening its grip over an increasingly dissatisfied and restive black population. The book examines the responses of established resistance organisations like the ANC, SAIC and Communist Party of South Africa to these changing circumstances, in this regard, changes in the leadership, strategies, tactics and ideological conceptions are investigated as they serve as a backdrop to the Congress of the People.

The 1950s brought with it significant gains for the resistance movements. These are assessed and evaluated. The areas of weaknesses are examined and linked to the decision by the ANC to launch and conduct the campaign for the COP in conjunction with the SAIC, and the more recently constituted SACPO, SACOD, SACTU and FSAW.

Outlines the origins, the aims and objectives and the nature of the campaign as conceptualised by me four national sponsoring organisations. It also investigates the role of the National Action Council in coordinating the campaign. It provides an overview of the scope of the campaign in Natal, the Cape Province and the Orange Free State and examines the structures at the provincial and local levels mat were established to organise and direct the campaign.

Chapter 4 makes an in-depth study of the campaign in the Transvaal. It examines me launch of the campaign in the province, the composition and establishment of the Provincial Action Council, the recruitment of volunteers and their training, the methods of gathering demands in the urban and rural areas, the involvement of the trade union and women's movements, the reasons for the participation of the South African Peace Council, and the responses of different racial sectors to the campaign. It also describes the atmosphere and the proceedings at the Congress of the People itself.

The final chapter outlines the Freedom Charter popularisation campaign in the form of the Million Signature Campaign and analyses the reasons for its dismal failure. It sketches the reaction and criticisms to the Freedom Charter, particularly from the Africanist faction within the ANC. It ends with a clause-by-clause analysis of the Charter as developed and propagated by the Congress Alliance in the post-1955 period; and assesses whether this marked a radical ideological shift and development in the Congress movement as a whole.