Seventy years ago, on 26 June 1955, the South African Freedom Charter was adopted by the Congress of the People (COP) at Kliptown, near Soweto, South Africa. There were 2,884 delegates from across the country in attendance at the Congress over two days. The delegates present “included wizened black countrymen and office workers with bright American ties, smooth Indian lawyers with their wives in saris, and swaying black grandmothers in wide skirts in the ANC colours.”1

The Congress presented the special award of Isitwalande to Chief Albert Luthuli, Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Father Trevor Huddleston. Only Father Huddleston was present to hear the cheers as Chief Luthuli and Dr Dadoo were banned.2 Many others, including Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, who would have attended as delegates, were also banned at that time.

The Freedom Charter opens with the words, “We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: That 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 the people.”2.

The Freedom Charter then lays out the requirements for a free and democratic South Africa with a set of aims (see end). It concluded, “These freedoms we will fight for, side by side, throughout our lives, until we have won our liberty.”

In 1952 the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress demanded that the government repeal six specific apartheid laws. If it failed to do so, the Congresses would launch a mass campaign of defiance of apartheid. The government ignored the demand, and the enrolment of volunteers began with Nelson Mandela as volunteer-in-chief. Volunteers would break selected laws after notifying the authorities that they would do so and therefore invite arrest. They would offer no resistance to arrest nor pay any fines. Volunteers took up positions at ‘whites only’ post office counters and railway stations, sat at ‘whites only’ park benches and remained in town after curfew. They were duly arrested, offered no resistance and were tried and jailed. The campaign quickly caught on and the numbers jailed grew into thousands and the jails filled to overflowing.

The government struck back with a new law creating the crime of ‘offence by way of protest’ with penalties including long-term hard labour or the imposition of lashes. This posed a problem for the leaders of the Defiance Campaign as in a few places volunteers had reacted to provocative acts of violence by the police. Consequently, peaceful acts inviting arrest had sometimes turned into minor riots. The use of the new act with its brutal powers would further increase the volunteers’ anger and encourage a decline into violence.

Continuing defiance in these circumstances would be reckless. The congresses therefore called a halt to the campaign to avoid risking bloodshed and a dangerous set-back for the movement.

Defiance had not brought the repeal of a single unjust law, “but we never had any illusion that they would be. We selected them as the greatest way to engage people in the struggle. Prior to the campaign the ANC was more talk than action…As a result of the campaign our membership swelled to 100,000. The ANC emerged as a truly mass-based organisation with an enormous corps of experienced activists who had braved the police, the courts and the jails…From the Defiance Campaign onwards going to prison became a badge of honour among Africans."3

The end of the Defiance Campaign allowed time to re-group and prepare for the next round of struggle.

In 1954 the ANC called a meeting of its allies, the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured Peoples Organisation, the Congress of Democrats (white progressives) and the South African Congress of Trade Unions to discuss next moves. Each organisation would have a delegation of eight. The meeting was held in a rural school for Indian children, near Stanger, where ANC President General Chief Albert Luthuli had been confined by ministerial decree. “A meeting at leadership level without Luthuli was unthinkable. Mahomet could not come to the mountain, so the mountain came to Stanger.” Luthuli presided over some forty delegates, “who tucked themselves uncomfortably into children’s desks. The classroom, murky enough with its dusty windows by day, was even murkier when only lit by storm lanterns at night. The atmosphere was somewhat conspiratorial, since several of those present were in breach of ministerial bans. Such a high-level meeting of all the congresses was unprecedented.”4

There was no agenda and no prepared proposals. The meeting had been called to consider ‘what to do now?’ According to Rusty Bernstein most of the ideas thrown up were “uninspired and had been aired many times before – proposals for an anti-pass campaign with mass burning of passes, a nationwide petition, a mass conference, a day of stay-at-home. All sounded tired and routine and seemed to be a step backwards from the high confidence and militancy of the Defiance Campaign."5

Professor Z. K. Matthews reiterated his proposal which had been carried at the ANC’s Cape Provincial Conference and passed on to the national executive some time before. It had seemed to run out of steam as conference resolutions often do. He proposed that the congresses join forces to convene a Congress of the People where a Freedom Charter would be adopted. The ANC’s failure to act initially on his proposal may have reflected the poor state of the organisation at that time or that the idea appeared to be too moderate and seemed like a retreat away from acts of mass confrontation with the authorities.

“Prof”, as he was known, explained that a Congress of the People would be a step forward and that it would provide a detailed programme of fundamental social, political and economic change which could point the way to an alternative South Africa. He explained that it could start with a nationwide canvas to enrol all adults on a single non-racial voters’ roll; design constituencies and arrange elections for seats at the Congress of the People.

The Prof’s idea was accepted in principle. “It seemed to have just the sweep of vision which we needed to break out of the quietus, and to inspire the movement with new enthusiasm. It felt like an idea whose time had come.”6

A Resolutions Committee was elected to formulate it in detail. Nelson Mandela was appointed convenor and the committee met that night. The committee thought that the practical implementation of the Prof’s plan appeared to require the resources of a small state. It was agreed to trim the concept down to a manageable size. In place of the national voters’ roll and constituencies it was agreed to run a campaign to persuade people to formulate their own proposals for a Freedom Charter. A Congress of the People would be called comprising delegates from all organisations and groups.

The committee’s proposal was adopted by the conference next day and a National Action Council was elected bringing together representatives from the different congresses including Walter Sisulu (ANC), Adam Daniels (CPC), Piet Beyleveld(CPC) and Rusty Bernstein (COD) under the chairmanship of Oliver Tambo. This National Action Council’s composition was significant in that it served as the first truly non-racial forum for the planning of joint political work for the Congresses. It set about putting into action the agreement made at Stanger.

“Politics is not a controlled happening. The Prof had proposed something new without intending to cause a revolution. But that was what happened. Relationships between Congress and the people had to be turned on their head; the people had to be encouraged to speak for themselves and, for the first time activists had to learn to listen. From that process came a radical Freedom Charter and the first outlines of a revolutionary new South Africa.” 7

The National Action Council published a “Call”, written by Rusty Bernstein, which crystallised its essence as ‘Let Us Speak of Freedom’, asking people everywhere to collaborate in setting the terms of the Freedom Charter. This provided the agenda for the different organisations to set up thousands of meetings up and down the country. An army of volunteers was established to gather the ideas of the people.

“Literally tens of thousands of scraps of paper came flooding in: a mixture of smooth writing-pad paper, torn pages from ink-blotched school exercise books, bits of cardboard, asymmetrical portions of brown and white paper, and even the unprinted margins of bits of newspaper”. 8 A small team separated and collated all these bits of paper and then divided them into various categories of demands. From this, Rusty Bernstein drafted the Freedom Charter which was a statement of core principles characterised by the opening demand “The People Shall Govern”. The Freedom Charter was then agreed by the National Action Council and presented to the people over the two-day Congress of the People.

On the first day (25 June 1955) of the Congress of the People the Freedom Charter was recited in three languages, English, Sesotho and Xhosa, and was approved with shouts of ‘Afrika’ from the crowd.

On the second day as the Congress moved through the aims of the Freedom Charter the afternoon proceedings were suddenly disrupted by plain-clothes detectives and police armed with Sten guns. Another group of police armed with rifles formed a cordon. An officer took the microphone and announced that they were investigating high treason and were searching for subversive documents. The people responded by singing loudly Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and adopting the Freedom Charter. The police took the names of all those present one by one before they were permitted to leave.

Mandela, along with Walter Sisulu, who was also banned from attending, had watched the gathering from among the crowd of some 7,000 beyond the assembled delegates. He commented, “I knew that this raid signalled a harsh new turn on the part of the government.” He also wrote, “Though the Congress had been broken up, the charter itself became a great beacon for the liberation struggle.”9

Mandela was correct on both counts. On 5 December 1956 the apartheid police arrested 156 people from all over the country and charged them with high treason. The key document in support of the charge was the Freedom Charter. The “Treason Trial” lasted four years when eventually the last group of accused were acquitted. The trial was partly designed to remove the leaders of the liberation movement from active struggle. However, because it brought together the leaders from across the racial divide and from across the country it welded them together and served as the organising and unifying centre of the people. It was an unintended consequence of the actions of the apartheid state.

The process of creating the Freedom Charter brought together Africans, Indians, Coloureds and Whites. This development was the antithesis of apartheid which divided racial groups by race. It laid the basis for the non-racial policy of the ANC, It also led to the breakaway of the “Africanists” who rejected the idea that South Africa belongs to all who live in it as stated in the Freedom Charter. They split from the ANC and set-up the Pan-African Congress.

The Freedom Charter created the basis for the emergence of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Mass Democratic Movement in the 1980s which brought together people of all races in the struggle against apartheid. The UDF was comprised of hundreds of organisations including trades unions, students’ unions, churches and women’s organisations. Its slogan was “UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides”.

The Freedom Charter captured the hopes and dreams of the people, and it became a great beacon for the liberation struggle throughout the ensuing decades until the defeat of apartheid on 27 April 1994 in the first democratic election in the history of South Africa with the resounding victory of the African National Congress.

The Constitution of the free South Africa is largely based on the Freedom Charter.