1985 Foreword

Summary

This book tries to recover a crucial aspect of South African history – the making of the Freedom Charter. The Freedom Charter has a unique authority because of the mode of its creation. Never before, or since, have the people of South Africa themselves put down their own vision of the type of society in which they would like to live.

In one sense the adoption of the Charter represented a continuation of earlier resistance. But in another sense, it marked the start of a new phase in the South African struggle. For the first time in the history of South African resistance, the people were actively involved in formulating their own vision of an alternative society. The majority of people would no longer seek to modify the existing order, to be assimilated into a society whose basis they fundamentally rejected. While the process by which the masses had come to this decision had been developing over decades, the Congress of the People represented the crucial historical moment: a completely new order, based on the will of the people, was put on the agenda.

This decision has considerable relevance today. From the moment of the adoption of the Charter, all political solutions “from above” were ruled out. That is why, even if a “fourth chamber” or any similar forum were today offered to Africans under the present constitution, it would still be rejected. From the time of the adoption of the Charter, the people have been unwilling to accept any “solutions” that fall short of its demands and are not of their own creation.

For many years state repression made it difficult to obtain the Charter or to propagate it. Certainly it was hard to find out about the Congress of the People campaign. The suppression of popular history facilitates oppression. Oppressors know that people draw inspiration from the struggles and traditions of the past.

The recovery of the history of democratic struggle is therefore part of the process of freeing South Africa.

The Freedom Charter was created in a period of massive development of popular organisation – the 1950s. It is well-known that the extreme repression of the 1960s and most of the 1970s halted this process, and that many South Africans have in fact grown up ignorant of its existence.