Mr. Ngubane poses as an expert on the Communistic doctrines of Marx, Lenin and Engels and finds the Freedom Charter a Congress implementation of these doctrines. I do not claim to be such an expert, but I deny categorically Mr. Ngubane’s charges and I dare him to prove them. The most that could be said about the Freedom Charter is that it breathes in some of its clauses a socialistic and welfare state outlook, and certainly not a Moscow communistic outlook. Mr. Ngubane is concerned that the Charter calls for the nationalisation of certain branches of commerce and industry – in actual fact the number of such industries and commercial undertakings so mentioned is very limited; the Charter in this regard reads: ‘The national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people; the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; all other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the well-being of the people; all people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions.’ ‘The Land shall be shared among those who work it.’ Mr. Ngubane would like the world to believe that this is a document preaching the Moscow communistic creed. In modern society, even amongst the so-called capitalistic countries, nationalisation of certain industries and commercial undertakings has become an accepted and established fact (Luthuli 1956: n.p.).
Even though the comments of Mandela and Luthuli suggest that there was contestation within the ANC over the redistributive emphasis of the Freedom Charter, it was ratified at the Annual Conference of 1955. Its strong advocacy of social rights and state intervention in securing such rights made it compatible with the development of a Keynesian, social democratic welfare state, based on the social rights of citizenship. This represented an unequivocal continuity with the social democratic agenda established in the 1940s by the ANC. Far from being a ‘minimum programme’, the Freedom Charter suggested such a far-reaching transformation of South Africa that it would take a social revolution to achieve the goals of the ‘good society’ implied in the realisation of its demands. Seen from the lens of a democratic South Africa, the realisation of these demands implies a radical transformation in the organisation of political and economic power in the country.
The National Party under Hendrik Verwoerd viewed the Freedom Charter as a direct challenge to its state authority, and the charter was met with a hostile response. The National Party arrested the leadership of all the major political groups that had been involved in the Freedom Charter campaign, foremost of which was the ANC. Over a period of four years, during the Treason Trial, it attempted to prove that the citizenship demands of the Freedom Charter could be achieved only by a violent overthrow of the ruling government. The attempt to do so failed, and the case was dropped in March 1961 when the court ruled there was no case to answer.
The ANC was committed to civil disobedience campaigning, which, it hoped, would lead to the ruling party agreeing to a national convention. Such a national convention would allow for meaningful negotiations on a future constitutional order, based on the universal extension of the franchise. The National Party regime rejected the proposal for a national convention and resorted to increased violent repression of political protest, culminating in the indiscriminate shooting of unarmed anti-pass law protesters in Sharpeville on 21 March 1960. A state of emergency was declared nine days later, effectively outlawing all opposition political activity. The ANC and the PAC were banned following the promulgation of the Unlawful Organisations Act No. 34 of 1960.
The ANC’s response to the banning was contained in a statement by an Emergency Committee of the ANC on 1 April 1960. Recording that the ANC had historically attempted a non-violent, peaceful solution to resolving South Africa’s political problems, the statement indicated that such a solution was not possible under the current government of Verwoerd: ‘The first essential towards resolving the crisis is that the Verwoerd administration must make way for one less completely unacceptable to the people, of all races, for a Government which sets out to take the path, rejected by Verwoerd, of conciliation, concessions and negotiation’ (in Karis and Carter 1987: 573).
It reiterated political citizenship as its primary demand: ‘We cannot and never shall compromise on our fundamental demands, as set forth in the Freedom Charter, for the full and unqualified rights of all our people as equal citizens of our country. We do not ask for more than that; but we shall never be satisfied with anything less’ (in Karis and Carter 1987: 573).
Finally, the statement listed a set of proposals calling for the end of the state of emergency and the release of political prisoners, scrapping the system of pass laws, and doing away with laws curbing civil and political rights, concluding with the demand for a ‘new National Convention representing all people on a fully democratic basis, [which] must be called to lay the foundations of a new union, a non-racial democracy, belonging to all South Africans, and in line with the United Nations Charter and the views of all enlightened people everywhere in the world’ (in Karis and Carter 1987: 573).
The banning of the ANC in 1960 put an end to the possibility of dialogue between the opposition movement and the government on a democratic constitutional order, based on a universal franchise. The banned ANC was left with no alternative but to rely on mass mobilisation and underground forms of struggle as a means of overthrowing the apartheid regime, including the use of armed struggle.
By 1962, Luthuli was more categorical about the form of interventions that the state should support to realise the post-apartheid good society. In an article entitled ‘If I were Prime Minister’, published in the United States in Ebony magazine in February 1962, he offered economic and social policy proposals that unambiguously reflected his intention to establish a social democratic welfare state in South Africa if he was made prime minister:
The solution to the South African problem will call for radical reforms, some of them of a really revolutionary nature. The basic reform will be in the form of the government. At present, there is a government by whites only. This should be replaced by a government which is truly a government of all the people, for the people, and by the people. This can only be so in a state where all adults – regardless of race, colour or belief – are voters. Nothing but such a democratic form of government, based on the parliamentary system, will satisfy (Luthuli 1962: 21).
Indicating his own preference for a state based on social democracy, Luthuli argued that to address the ‘man-made inequality’ of apartheid ‘will demand what will appear to whites in South Africa to be revolutionary changes. Some form of a system such as is found in Great Britain and Sweden might meet the case’ (Luthuli 1962: 22).
Luthuli then expressed the mechanisms that the state would employ to achieve its social democratic policy goals of free education, affordable municipal housing and state-provided employment for ‘the bulk of people’, who would also enjoy unqualified rights to unionisation:
It is inevitable that nationalization and control – even on a larger scale than now – would be carried out by the government of the day after freedom, if justice is to be done to all, and the state enabled to carry out effectively its uplift work … State control will be extended to cover the nationalization of some sectors of what at present is private enterprise. It will embrace specifically monopoly industries, the mines and banks, but excluding such institutions as building societies (Luthuli 1962: 23).
Luthuli then advocated that the new government should have as its objective the creation of a ‘democratic social welfare state’: ‘I realize that a state such as I visualize – a democratic social welfare state – cannot be born in one day. But it will be the paramount task of the government to bring it about and advance it without crippling industry, commerce, farming and education’ (1962: 26, emphasis added).
Most tellingly the article reveals that Luthuli had given some thought to the actual policies that the state would employ in order to achieve its goals that were consistent with social democracy. These included government regulation and nationalisation of the private sector; redistributive rates of taxation; and protection of workers’ right to strike, concomitant with the entitlements associated with ‘social compacting’-type accords between labour, the