The African Claims policy framework for a social democratic future was firmly rooted in the intellectual traditions of the ANC. This was reflected in the Atlantic Charter Committee of 1943, assembled by Xuma to prepare the provisions of the African Claims document. The committee included leading figures of the African intelligentsia, such as the chairperson, ZK Matthews (executive member of the ANC); James Calata (secretary general of the ANC); Moses Kotane (general secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa [CPSA]1 and member of the ANC); Govan Mbeki (trade secretary of the Federation of Organised Bodies in Transkei); Edwin Mofutsanyana (member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC and member of the CPSA); Gana Makabeni, trade unionist and president of the Council of Non-European Trade Unions); Pixley ka Isaka Seme (attorney and member of the ANC National Executive Committee); RV Selope Thema (editor of Bantu World, member of the Native Representative Council and speaker of the ANC); and AB Xuma (president general of the ANC). The thinking of the Atlantic Charter Committee was distilled in African Claims in South Africa, the most significant statement by the ANC in the war years on the new post-war ‘good society’, based on black enfranchisement and social rights of citizenship. Its strategic political intervention was to apply political, civil and social rights, which were advocated in the Atlantic Charter and endorsed by the ruling United Party, to the disenfranchised black people in South Africa.
The section on a Bill of Rights in African Claims echoed the American Declaration of Independence. It set out the most unequivocal statement of African expectations for full, unqualified rights to citizenship: ‘We, the African people in the Union of South Africa, urgently demand the granting of full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa’ (ANC 1943: 217). The Bill of Rights then stipulated in greater detail the content of such citizenship, its specificity worth citing in some detail:
•civil rights: ‘To equal justice in courts of law, including nominations to juries and appointment as judges, magistrates and other court officials’; ‘Freedom of movement, and the repeal of the pass laws’. ‘The right to own, buy, hire or lease and occupy land and all other forms of … property.’
•political rights, based on: ‘Abolition of political discrimination based on race … and the extension to all adults, regardless of race, of the right to vote and be elected to parliament, provincial councils and other representative institutions’; ‘The right to be appointed to and hold office in the civil service and in all branches of public employment.’
•social rights, based on: ‘The establishment of free medical and health services for all sections of the population’; ‘The right of every child to free and compulsory education and of admission to technical schools, universities and other institutions of higher education’; ‘Equality of treatment with any other section of the population in the State social services, and the inclusion on an equal basis with Europeans in any scheme of social security’; ‘That the African worker … be insured against sickness unemployment, accidents, old age and for all other physical disabilities arising from the nature of their work; the contributions to such insurance should be borne entirely by the government and the employers’; ‘The extension of all industrial welfare legislation to Africans engaged in Agriculture, Domestic Service and in Public institutions or bodies’ (ANC 1943: 217–221).
The ANC’s 1943 Bill of Rights started from civil rights. These, in turn, led directly to political rights and finally to recognition of social rights. These claims prefigured TH Marshall’s famous 1950 essay on citizenship and social class and the political evolution of civil, political and social rights through three consecutive stages (Marshall 1950). It represented the most significant statement on non-racial, universal rights of citizenship in the period of the 1940s, and, in its universality and focus on state-provided ‘public goods’, unambiguously represented the origins of inclusive social democratic thinking and a concomitant social democratic development path for post-segregation South African society.
However, for the ANC, led by Xuma, the absence of political enfranchisement of blacks revealed the limits of liberalisation and the possibilities for a broadly social democratic reform agenda suggested in the early war years. The authors of African Claims were not naive in their belief that the radical claims made would be acceded to. In the document’s preface, Xuma states: ‘As African leaders we are not so foolish as to believe that because we have made these declarations that our government will grant us our claims for the mere asking. We realise that for the African this is only a beginning of a long struggle entailing great sacrifices of them, means and even life itself. To the African people the declaration is a challenge to organise and unite themselves under the mass liberation movement, the African National Congress’ (ANC 1943: 210).
After repeated failed attempts to secure a meeting with Smuts to discuss the implications of the Atlantic Charter, Xuma sent him a copy of African Claims and its Bill of Rights (Gish 2000). After reading the document, Smuts sent a reply to Xuma through his private secretary, Henry Cooper, in September 1944, rejecting African Claims as a ‘propagandistic document intended to propagate the views of your Congress … [The prime minister] … does not agree with your effort to stretch its meaning so as to make it apply to all sorts of African problems and conditions. That is an academic affair which does not call for any intervention on his part …’ (in Gish 2000: 129). The failure to implement inclusive social policies demonstrated the limits of social citizenship based on social democratic ideas in the absence of civil and political rights.
By 1945, the possibility of developing and implementing progressive social policies of a social democratic character was eclipsed by the right-wing drift of the white electorate, who voted the United Party back into power on a 110-seat majority in July 1943. The ANC, meanwhile, underwent a radicalisation following the confluence of a new militant Africanist nationalism under the stewardship of Anton Lembede and AP Mda, along with the increasing influence of trade unionism, the rise of civil disobedient squatter movements and boycotts of bus services.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE FREEDOM CHARTER
The account of how the Freedom Charter came to be conceived, how a ‘thoroughly bourgeois activist’ (Bernstein 1999: 145), ZK Matthews, came to propose this ‘radical’ charter in Stanger, how the document came to be assembled from scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes are all well known. In his account of it, Rusty Bernstein (1999), one of its drafters, along with Ben Turok and many others, makes two important points. The first relates to the way in which the charter had to reconcile what appeared to be quite irreconciable demands, reflecting the different strands within the ANC Alliance at the time. Thus, on economic policy, there were, among the scraps of paper in the tin trunk where they had been collected, demands for the nationalisation of mines and banks, alongside demands to end barriers to black private ownership and shareholding. Phraseology had to be employed creatively in an attempt to keep all sides happy, not always with success. Claims were made that the Communist Party influence ensured that the document had a socialist flavour and substance.
The reflections of Turok, a leading South African Communist Party (SACP) activist, on a 1953 clandestine meeting held at the factory of Julius First (a senior Party member) seems to support a non-interventionist Party influence in the strategic discussions on the Freedom Charter. The meeting was convened by Yusuf Dadoo, chairperson of the Central Committee of the SACP, with a group of seasoned communist activists, including Fred Carneson, Joe Slovo and Ruth First.
We met in the factory, in the shed. And there were fires – coal burners – around the table, because it was freezing cold. And Yusuf opened up with a sort of international perspective. And then Michael Harmel led and so on. Now, we [the SACP] had a document called the ‘Minimum Programme’.2 When I was asked to speak, I thought, what am I going to say? I think I was told that, well, the Party programme, the Minimum Programme, should be somehow a basis for the Freedom Charter. Now it’s not an instruction and I don’t remember how that happened. I’m not sure that I consciously said to myself or anybody else that the Freedom Charter must reflect the Minimum Programme of the Party. But I think that in my mind there was that, you see. So when I came up to the meeting,