Matthews found his people’s prospects much deteriorated. The Nationalists’ second election victory the year before was really greater than it appeared, he pointed out, because “the opposition parties are but pale reflections of the government party as far as their colour policies are concerned.”3 Over lunch with his sons at home, Matthews first discussed the idea of a gathering of all races to discuss the possibility of a multiracial constitution.4 Other groups took up the idea, and in August 1953 Matthews, as President of the Cape ANC, formally proposed it at their annual conference: “I wonder whether the time has not come for the ANC to consider the question of convening a National Convention, A CONGRESS OF THE PEOPLE, representing all the people of this country irrespective of race or colour to draw up a FREEDOM CHARTER for the DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA OF THE FUTURE.”5
“Little did I realize when I uttered those words,” he recalled later, “that I was laying the foundation of a charge of treason.”6 It was ironic, Mandela commented in jail twenty years afterward, that Matthews, who had been criticized as a fence-sitter, should have conceived the dynamic idea which became “the vortex of our aspirations.”7 Mandela welcomed the proposed convention as a public display of strength, and compared it to the founding of the ANC in 1912. It was all the more important since he suspected that the ANC might soon be banned altogether.8
The idea was endorsed at the next annual conference of the ANC in Queenstown in December 1953. It was much more confident and well reported than the Bloemfontein conference two years earlier which had initiated the Defiance Campaign. There was clearly tension between Marxist speakers, who saw the struggle in class terms, and the Christian approach of the President, Albert Luthuli, who insisted: “The urge and yearning for freedom springs from a sense of DIVINE DISCONTENT and so, having a divine origin, can never be permanently humanly gagged.”9 Some of the nationalists wanted to expel Sisulu for collaborating with other races, but the majority of the delegates were convinced of the need to cooperate: Luthuli pointed to the dangerous example of narrow Afrikaner nationalism, and insisted that African nationalism be broader, democratic and progressive. The need for a Freedom Charter was agreed upon, and the conference instructed the executive to make immediate preparations for a Congress of the People, including a corps of national Freedom Volunteers.
In March 1954 Sisulu and Mandela helped organize a meeting with some of the ANC’s allies at Tongaat, close to Luthuli’s home area, to which he was now restricted.10 An eight-member National Action Council was set up to prepare for the Congress of the People. Only two of the council members (Luthuli and Sisulu) were from the ANC, which the nationalists were quick to depict as a sign of domination by outsiders. The other six included two from the South Africa Indian Congress, two from the newly formed South African Coloured People’s Organization and two from the new body of white ANC supporters, the Congress of Democrats, which was made up largely of communists, whose involvement brought new controversies and suspicions.
The SACP’s Central Committee, which included Joe Slovo and Rusty Bernstein, threw itself into organizing the Congress of the People, holding many secret meetings.11 The more nationalist ANC members, the “Africanists,” were alarmed by the communist influence, but Mandela appreciated the hard work and total commitment of friends like Bram Fischer and Michael Harmel, who had been hounded and persecuted as much as the blacks, and who shared his goal of overthrowing white domination.12 He no longer believed that communists were necessarily against the Church as he noted that many black communists were genuine Christians.13 When Canon Collins came to Johannesburg from London in 1954, Mandela assured him that the ANC was not communist, though the government was driving it in that direction: “There was little time left for there to be a possibility of real co-operation between black and white.”14
The ANC invited another newly formed white organization as well as the Congress of Democrats to cosponsor the Congress of the People. The Liberal Party had been formed in the wake of the April 1953 general election—in which the Nationalists had increased their majority—to counter the forces of racism. Its leaders included respected academics and intellectuals including the novelist Alan Paton, and it would be helped by Harry Oppenheimer, the Chairman of the huge Anglo-American Corporation. The Liberals were totally opposed to apartheid, but they stopped well short of calling for universal franchise, and were hostile to the communists. “Between communists and liberals,” wrote Paton later, “there is a fundamental incompatibility.”15
Most Liberals remained aloof from the ANC and its communist friends, but some ANC leaders would make friends with individual members of the new party: President Luthuli was in touch, Mandela noted, with the most liberal Liberals, and welcomed the party as an ally against white supremacy. Mandela too had Liberal friends—notably Patrick Duncan, who had joined the Defiance Campaign—but he was critical of the Liberal Party. He was already foreseeing the need for violence, and thought the Liberals would get in his way. And he was impatient with the Liberals’ refusal to support universal suffrage.
In June 1953 Mandela wrote an article entitled “Searchlight on the Liberal Party.” It was published in a new monthly periodical, Liberation, which was edited by Michael Harmel, with Mandela himself on its editorial board. He attacked the Liberals’ insistence on “democratic and constitutional means” and their refusal to support “one adult, one vote.” He saw them as part of the European ruling class, which, he said, “hates and fears the idea of a revolutionary democracy in South Africa just as much as the Malans and the Oppenheimers do.”16 He predicted a clear parting of the ways between those who committed themselves to the revolutionary program and those who did not, between the friends and the enemies of the Congress. And he asked, as he would often ask again: “Which side, gentlemen, are you on?”17
The Liberals replied through Professor Tom Price, who poured scorn on Mandela’s “rosy clichés born of the October Revolution”—an attack which, as the Liberal Party’s historian Randolph Vigne lamented, “served only to draw the battle lines between the Liberals and the new Congressites, black and white.” The Liberals at first welcomed the chance to cosponsor the Congress of the People; but they soon became convinced that they were being lured into a “popular front” whose decisions were taken in advance by communist elements. They believed, moreover, that the Congress would be “a very minor affair,” and decided to withdraw before it was held—to the later regret of many of their members: the historian David Everatt concluded that the decision was “one of the most damaging the party ever took.”18
Preparations continued without the Liberals, but with much input from the white communists in the Congress of Democrats. Groups across the country held hundreds of meetings, submitting their own drafts and proposals which would be incorporated in a grand Freedom Charter to be put forward at the Congress. The response was certainly vigorous, welcoming very different concepts of freedom—including the freedom to have ten wives. As Joe Slovo later described it: “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 bags, and even the unprinted margins of bits of newspaper.”19
Some suspected that this democratic outpouring was not quite as spontaneous as it looked. Sydney Kentridge, who was later to be Mandela’s counsel, noticed that many of the demands were in the same handwriting, and suspected that a classic communist technique was secretly at work: to detach the masses from their previous leaders.20 But the eventual Freedom Charter was very far from being a communist manifesto. Long after, Mandela remained convinced that “it was a document born of the people. It was not something that was imposed from the top. And that is why it is still relevant even today.”21 He was impressed by “how far ahead of the politicians the masses were, in several respects.” The people realized that political power was essential, but also that it would be meaningless without economic power. He was struck too b
y their lack of extreme nationalism, and their acceptance of the principle that South Africa belonged to all its people.22
Behind the scenes, Mandela worked very closely with Walter Sisulu, who was now being pursued by the police. Z. K. Matthews told the Cape ANC in June that Sisulu was operating behind the “iron curtain” of the Transkei as a Scarlet Pimpernel (before Mandela inherited the title): “They sought him here, they sought him there, they sought him everywhere.”23 The police soon caught up with him in his house in Orlando in July 1954. I happened to be with him. He was talking with his usual analytical detachment about bannings and detentions, when two Afrikaner detectives walked in. They were surprisingly friendly: “Ah, we’ve found you at last: two letters from the Minister of Justice for you!” “I’ve been expecting you,” Sisulu answered. “Only two? It won’t make any difference, you know. The struggle will go on!” The detective smiled: “Cheerio then—Afrika!”24
The next day Sisulu was arrested, and was later sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for having attended a gathering of five people. But he remained the moving force behind the African National Congress. In August 1954 he recalled how five years earlier he had promised that, as Secretary of the ANC, “I shall be entirely at your disposal.” He described how crippling bans had already removed most members of the National Executive, including Mandela, but insisted that the movement was growing in strength: “The government has already been shaken, the time has passed when they could rule the country as if we, the people, did not exist.”25 In fact, Sisulu was still regarded by his colleagues as Secretary of the ANC, with Mandela as his close partner.
The first draft of the Freedom Charter was created by the communist architect Rusty Bernstein, who rather casually added a rhetorical beginning and ending—which he later thought overblown.26 In early June it was passed on to a small planning group, including Mandela, who made a few changes. The Charter’s meaning was to become a battleground for the next thirty-five years while it remained pickled in history, its authors jailed or exiled. It was frequently condemned as a Marxist document, with its bold promise: “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.” But in fact it was carefully designed to be all things to all men: Mandela saw it as having been welded from the demands of the masses, arising out of their daily lives.27 It proclaimed principles rather than policies, in a declamatory style like a political psalm. Michael Harmel, the Marxist historian of the SACP, claimed with some reason that it “stems from the tradition of the proclamation of rights of the French and American revolutions and echoed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.”28
The Freedom Charter opened 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.29
The Congress of the People was fixed for June 26, 1955 (now established as the annual Freedom Day). It was held on a private sports field in Kliptown, near Soweto. Three thousand delegates converged from all over the country on the cheerful scene, which looked more like a Derby Day than a militant demonstration. They 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 colors.30 There was a clear communist influence, with stalls distributing left-wing pamphlets and a fraternal message from Chou En-lai in Beijing. But the meeting itself had the leisurely, casual character of traditional Congress meetings, with Christian elements including Father Huddleston, who was given a special ANC honor.
Mandela, like most of the organizers, was banned from the meeting and could only watch it from afar. He had driven to Kliptown with Sisulu, and moved around the edge of the crowd in a thin disguise, standing for a time next to a bearded man from the Transkei, marveling at the people’s dedication.31 It seemed surprising that the Kliptown meeting was not itself banned; the reason for this soon became clear.
Mandela watched the Congress follow its slow course. On the first day the Freedom Charter was recited in three languages, and was approved with shouts of “Afrika!” from the crowd. On the second day each section of the Charter was acclaimed in turn, until they reached the words “there shall be peace and friendship.” At that point the meeting was suddenly disrupted by detectives and policemen armed with sten guns bursting into the crowd. An Afrikaner officer took the microphone and announced that they were investigating high treason, and were searching for subversive documents. The police took down the names of every spectator before they were allowed to leave, trooping away peacefully while a band with a dented tuba and broken drums played African songs. Mandela was tempted to join them, but thought better of it, and drove back to Johannesburg for an emergency meeting of the ANC leadership. It was gratifying that the police had recognized the importance of the Congress, but Mandela knew that the raid “signalled a harsh new turn.”32
The Freedom Charter soon acquired an independent momentum. It had not been completely endorsed at the Congress of the People, so its status was uncertain: as Rusty Bernstein saw it, the Charter had “drifted out of the Congresses’ control—and for lack of foresight had taken on a free-floating life of its own.”33 The white newspapers prominently reported the meeting and the police intervention, while not printing the Charter itself. But the text of the Charter soon reverberated within the ANC, and was challenged by formidable critics.34
In December 1955 the annual conference of the ANC debated the Charter in a stormy atmosphere, while most of its architects were banned from attending. The National Executive complained that many ANC branches “showed a complete lack of activity, as if some of them regretted the birth of this great and noble idea.”35 Luthuli himself was uneasy, as he told his Congress colleague Arthur Letele, about “certain new trends or cliques in Congress,” but he commended the Charter, and advocated an “all-inclusive African nationalism” which embraced all South Africans. Many nationalists, who now called themselves Africanists, resisted cooperation with other races. The former ANC President, Alfred Xuma, wrote a letter complaining about “certain tendencies” within the Congress, which he believed had “lost its identity as a National Liberation Movement with a policy of its own and distinct African leadership.” Mandela’s former mentor Peter Mda reasserted the original nationalism of the Youth League in an article in his journal the Africanist: “From our inception we saw the burning need of ridding the ANC of foreign domination.” He proclaimed: “NO WHITE MAN HAS EVER IMPRESSED US.”36
The annual conference eventually put off endorsing the Freedom Charter until a special conference in Orlando in April 1956. There it provoked a new storm. The Africanists complained that the conference had been packed by the Charterists, and attacked the idea that the land belonged to everyone, implicit in the phrase “South Africa belongs to all who live in it,” which suggested public ownership. Luthuli and the Natal branch had their own concerns about the economic clauses of the Charter, but they gave way in the cause of unity, not wanting to strengthen the hand of the Africanists.37 Luthuli was resisting pressure to dissociate himself from left-wing allies: that year his eccentric white Californian friend Mary-Louise Hooper, who had been raising funds for the ANC in America, suggested to him that the ANC should change its official lawyers, Mandela & Tambo, because their left-wing reputation was putting off potential donors. Luthuli replied that while he did not like communists, “it would not only be unwise but mean to forgo the services of any of our faithful and tried lawyers solely on the grounds of leftist leanings.”38
The Freedom Charter was eventually approved by the conference. It was a remarkable achievement, just when the Afrikaner government was imposing its exclusive racial power, for the ANC to adopt a manifesto which was above all antiracial.39 “For the first time in the history of our country,” wrote M
andela a year later, “the democratic forces irrespective of race, ideological conviction, party affiliation or religious belief have renounced and discarded racialism in all its ramifications.”40 But the Charter was approved at the cost of fierce dissension, which would split the ANC apart two years later.
Nelson Mandela gave his own interpretation of the Freedom Charter, which would later become significant, in an important article in Liberation in June 1956, the first anniversary of the Congress of the People. It was not just his view: all the articles in Liberation were carefully edited by the magazine’s whole board, and Mandela had been asked to “correct the assumption that the Freedom Charter was the embryo of a socialist state.”41 The article largely conformed to the Marxist interpretation of the Charter, which Mandela argued was 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.” And he underlined the need for public ownership: “The Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and goldmining monopolies that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude.”42
But in a crucial passage he welcomed the opportunity that would be created for free enterprise to expand: “The breaking up and democratisation of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of this country the non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.”43
For decades these two sentences would reverberate through subsequent trials and angry debates on Robben Island. They were omitted—as Trotskyists noted with relish—from the Liberation article when it appeared in Mandela’s published speeches and writings, edited by Ruth First in London and several times reprinted.44 But Mandela continued to state his belief that under the ANC private enterprise would “flourish as never before”—which would have a very practical significance forty years later.
Mandela Page 14