•Private enterprises, commerce and industry would be under government control as now, and probably stricter. Supertax on all high incomes should be levied on a higher percentage than now to meet the needs of uplifting the oppressed of former days.
•State control should be extended to cover the nationalisation of some sectors of what at present is private enterprise.
•Human rights as declared by the United Nations would be entrenched in the State Constitution.
•All workers would enjoy unqualified trade union rights with a charter laying down minimum wages and conditions. There would be no discrimination on grounds of colour or race. Merit would be the qualifying factor.
•The present framework of industrial legislation in so far as it applies to Whites would form the basis of industrial legislation. Workers would have the right to strike, for even if strikes might be costly and wasteful, it gives the individual a greater security if he knows he has the right, and it makes him feel a partner in the undertaking (Luthuli 1962: 23, emphasis added).
The discourse within the ANC between 1940 and 1962 as reflected in its key policy documents and the thinking of its presidents on a future state that could overcome the legacies of segregation and apartheid were premised on a state form that was democratic and would intervene in the economy to secure redistributive social policies in health, education and welfare. The substantive form of such a state was a social democratic welfare state. This is reflected in the policy formulations of the 1955 Freedom Charter, which demonstrated a reconnection with the inclusive discourse of the 1943 African Claims, and unequivocally in social policy with a social democratic idea of the post-apartheid ‘good society’.
The evidence from ANC policy literature and the reflections of key ANC thinkers and leaders such as Xuma and Luthuli (neither of whom were members of the CPSA) reveal that the ANC had an unmistakably social democratic view of the post-segregation and post-apartheid ‘good society’. Veterans such as Turok, Ahmed Kathrada and Mlangeni, whom we interviewed, confirm this picture of an ANC that was strongly committed to a society and an economy where the interests of the poor, marginalised, oppressed and exploited were to be the main focus of its work in any future democratic government, where it would rest with the state to drive this process through redistributive economic and social policies. Whether they articulated this as social democracy or socialism or something else matters less than the essential substance of the thinking and ideas.
The debate on ANC economic and social policies for a post-apartheid society, such as they were before 1994, were to evolve in three distinctive locales: Robben Island, the exile community and, in the latter part of the 1980s and 1990s, within South Africa. The following chapter reveals some telling observations from Mlangeni on the narrowing interpretations of the ‘nationalisation’ clause of the Freedom Charter as discussed among the imprisoned ANC comrades. It suggests that the more radical social democratic impetus, advocated by Luthuli up until and shortly following the banning of the ANC in 1961, would not be developed much further. The primary imperative of national liberation, based on a multi-class alliance of the oppressed, dominated the discourse of the ANC and eclipsed the clearly articulated policy proposals developed by Xuma and Luthuli.
CHAPTER
3
Incarceration, Exile and Homecoming, c.1960–c.1991
In 1961, the ANC was declared a banned organisation. Many of its leaders were arrested; others had to go underground or flee the country for Lusaka, London and other parts of the world sympathetic to their cause. The years that followed required a whosesale reorganistion of the movement in a difficult global context dominated by Cold War considerations. The West provided little support for the ANC, while offering considerable financial and political support to the apartheid regime. The role of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in tipping off the South African authorites about Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts, which led to his arrest near Howick, Natal, in August 1962, has been well documented. The US Consul in Durban, Donald Rickard, was the CIA operative who provided the information. The arrest had the effect of seriously setting back the struggle against the apartheid regime (Garcia 2016: n.d.). In London, Oliver Tambo secured a base for the ANC, from which it could begin the massive task of raising funds, developing new political strategies and growing international support under Cold War conditions. And in Lusaka, the ANC began, with limited resources, to establish a rudimentary living and working base, as well as the elaborate machinery and structures, to wage the military and propaganda campaign against the apartheid state (Macmillan 2013). In all this, the role of its (acting) president, Tambo, loomed large. But we begin this chapter on an island within view of Cape Town’s Table Mountain, which used to be a leper colony and is today one of the wonders of the new world.
ROBBEN ISLAND
The winter of 1964 on Robben Island, when Mandela and six other Rivonia prisoners arrived there, was the coldest that anyone could remember. So fierce were the Atlantic winds sweeping across the island that prisoners working in the quarries were numbed to the bone, hardly able to raise their picks … [The cell of the man who would forever be remembered as the world’s most famous prisoner] was so cold he slept fully dressed in prison garb. Outside the cell was fixed a white card giving his name and identification number: 466/64 (Meredith 1997: 281).
While robust, organised discussions occurred on matters of political economy and strategies of political liberation, very little of what we could describe as economic and social policy debates occurred within ANC or other circles on Robben Island. Here, as compared to the more policy-oriented, evidential and analytical chapters that follow, we can only offer some anecdotal and personalised glimpses into issues that are tangentially linked to economics and social policy. This is partly because, as Pallo Jordan has noted (see chapter 1), little such policy debate took place on the Island for understandable reasons, but also because so few reliable or consistent sources exist about those aspects of life on Robben Island. Ahmed Kathrada and Andrew Mlangeni (among the most senior ANC leaders who were imprisoned on the island from the mid-1960s), whom we interviewed for this study, confirm these impressions obtained from the secondary literature.
Education and economics on the Island
Robben Island lies off the coast of Cape Town and is the site where political prisoners were incarcerated by the National Party government. It was often referred to as ‘the university’ because a lot of learning took place there. Less well-educated prisoners took high school courses through Rapid Results College, and more formally educated comrades registered for degrees and diplomas at the University of South Africa (Unisa) – both were correspondence-based institutions. Mandela and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) leader Robert Smangiliso Sobukwe both studied at the University of London by correspondence, the latter for a degree in economics (Pogrund 1990: 195). One of the biggest problems faced by prisoners in relation to their studies was the restriction and censorship of books and other study material. All books bearing in the title the words Marx, Marxism, Lenin, Leninism, Russia, China, Cuba, socialism, communism, revolution, civil war, violence, Africa, anti-apartheid and all books of any kind written by black authors were routinely banned. Although most academic journals were also subject to draconian censorship, the South African Journal of Economics and African Studies were not proscribed. Most issues of the Financial Mail were stopped; the few let through were extensively redacted, apart from the advertisements. The British Economist somehow got through but only in a mutilated state until it, too, was banned in 1968. Farmer’s Weekly, Huisgenoot, Readers Digest, South African Panorama and Lantern were allowed in, although often heavily censored (Alexander 1994: 60–65).
Around 1966, Sobukwe was allowed to read the British economics magazine Economica, which had suddenly and without explanation been made available to him (Pogrund 1990: 241). Later, when formal studying was allowed, Sobukwe read, among other ‘heavyweight titles’ (as Benjamin Pogrund puts