The communist bogey would be portrayed more menacingly in the next stage of the ANC’s crusade, the preparation of what would be called the ‘Freedom Charter’. South African liberals and many Western sympathisers would depict the Charter as a typical communist ploy aimed at discreetly achieving influence through a popular front with carefully-orchestrated demonstrations, using ANC leaders as gullible pawns to endorse their propaganda. But that view was distorted by the magnifying glasses of the Cold War. The Charter’s message was directed not against capitalists or Western democrats, but against narrow nationalists, both Afrikaner and African. For Mandela and most of his colleagues the Charter was a historic breakthrough. It committed the ANC to discarding racialism and to widening the basis of the struggle, and was to become its key manifesto for the next forty years.
The originator of the Freedom Charter was neither a communist nor a militant, but the conservative elder statesman of the ANC, Z.K. Matthews, Mandela’s mentor at Fort Hare. Matthews had been forced to return to South Africa after a year in the United States in May 1953, when the government had refused to extend his passport. He came back in a more radical mood. He was now less admiring of the traditional black American hero Booker T. Washington than of his radical opponent Dr W.E.B. du Bois, the founder of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).1 When Matthews arrived at the airport the Special Branch took away books by authors including Arnold Toynbee, and also a photograph of Z.K.’s friend the singer, actor and communist Paul Robeson.2
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 multi-racial 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 realise 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 afterwards, that Matthews, who had been criticised 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 co-operate: 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 organise 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 Organisation, 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 organising 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 organisation as well as the Congress of Democrats to co-sponsor 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 programme and those who did not, between the friends and the enemies of Congress. And he asked, as he would often ask again: ‘Which side, gentlemen, are you on?’17